[RandomNick]

"For your actions in Panzer General will also lead to the deaths of millions, at only one more degree of remove at best."

No, my actions won't lead to a single death, no matter how many degrees you move away. It's just moving bits around in a computer.

"Or am I hopelessly overthinking it? Is Panzer General just a piece of harmless entertainment that happens to play with a subset of the stuff of history?"

The answer is an emphatic yes, you are really overthinking this.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I feel like you have taken that argument out of context. This appears just before it:

"What sorts of subject matter are appropriate for a game? Before you rush to answer, ask yourself how you would feel about, say, a version of Transport Tycoon where you have to move Jews from the cities where they live to the concentration camps where they will die."

If one feels completely comfortable with that, then the argument afterward can be disregarded. However, the author makes that argument on the assumption that you will feel uncomfortable with the above (as I'm sure a lot of us would) and posits that Panzer General should make you equally uncomfortable.

Further, I think it is unwise to brush aside any argument that the nature of the media we consume does not affect how we interact with the real world without consideration. Just because it turns out that old 90s arguments about DOOM turning us all into violent murderers was wrong doesn't mean that there aren't effects that might be harmful.

[RandomNick]

That previous section doesn't alter the context and doesn't change the fact that nothing I or the author or any other player does in a game like this leads to a single death, let alone millions.

If the author is uncomfortable taking on the role of a "German general goose-stepping and kowtowing to his Führer" then he should feel equally uncomfortable acting as a Soviet general goose-stepping for a dictator who imprisoned, tortured and starved millions of his own citizens. Or for that matter the U.S. or Britain. Forget anything based on ancient Greece or Rome as well. Might as well stick to Farmville or Mario Kart if you're going to continue down that road.

"Further, I think it is unwise to brush aside any argument that the nature of the media we consume does not affect how we interact with the real world without consideration. Just because it turns out that old 90s arguments about DOOM turning us all into violent murderers was wrong doesn't mean that there aren't effects that might be harmful."

I did not brush it aside, I read the entire rambling article, most of which had very little to do with any potential harmful effects and gave it a lot more consideration than it truly deserved. It was in no way compelling, nor did it contain any real insights. I stand by my earlier statement, he is really overthinking this.

[mcguire]

I'm interested in your ethical position here.

Is there anything short of mass murder which you would feel morally opposed to? (And if not, why that? I mean, if you are only concerned with harmful effects, killing on a large scale has gotten us where we are now, right?)

Is potential, practical, harmful effects the right dividing line? Is it a clear line; is there any issue you are unsure about? Would raising a toast, or a statue, to Stalin in the Ukraine raise some qualms, even though the act itself would hurt no one?

[RandomNick]

I am morally opposed to a lot of things. First and foremost, violence that is not in self-defense. So that covers wars, genocide, mass conscription, and taxation. Basically the modern state in general. But that is real life I'm talking about, which has nothing to do with what goes on within the confines of a video game. I'll go back to the original quote:

"For your actions in Panzer General will also lead to the deaths of millions, at only one more degree of remove at best."

Your actions, or the actions of anyone else in Panzer General will not lead to a single death, let alone millions. It makes no difference to anyone else but the person who is playing the game. If you enjoy playing the game, then great, have at it. If playing as a German General makes you uncomfortable then that's fine too. I really don't see any ethical issue here at all.

[qsort]

No offense but this is only a slightly refurbished version the "videogames make us murderers" type of argument. Those are extraordinary claims, and as such require extraordinary proof, when in fact no correlation (let alone causation) exists.

It's like claiming "it's unwise to brush aside any argument that reading HN makes your skin turn green", it's entirely baseless; I don't understand why the burden of proof should rest on me.

There's an argument that some themes might be less palatable to some people, but that effectively comes down to personal preferences. For example, I personally hold the view that lotteries and similar games are unethical, but is it really fair of me to cast those who play such games as "objectively immoral"?

[claudiawerner]

>It's like claiming "it's unwise to brush aside any argument that reading HN makes your skin turn green", it's entirely baseless; I don't understand why the burden of proof should rest on me.

I agree, which is why I have provided several resources to engage with the philosophical (and by following references, psychological and sociological) literature on the topic of the intersection between violent video games, morality, and (more dubiously and controversially) real world behavior here[0]. The arguments go for and against, but no author to my knowledge has argued that video games and their players do not at least qualify for moral consideration. Furthermore, these arguments are sometimes agnostic regarding major meta-ethical positions. Is this the kind of base for the argument you're looking for?

>For example, I personally hold the view that lotteries and similar games are unethical, but is it really fair of me to cast those who play such games as "objectively immoral"?

There's some concept shuffling here which does not accurately get to the heart of morality and moral resposibility. The word 'morality' is generally used in a normative sense (consider war, vegetarianism, killing, advertising, the environment, etc. as topics we frequently speak of in the normative sense), but your usage of the concept in describing lotteries as unethical targets the descriptive sense - a code accepted by an individual or a community[1].

The normative sense, which I believe the article and GP targets, concerns a code that would be accepted and followed by all rational people given access to moral facts (and processes of deliberation). Those facts may be deducible a priori (but need not be). This is the same sense in which someone might say "you should not do X".

Moral judgements may also imply moral responsibility - not only should you "not do X" as a rational person, but you are in some way responsible if you do do X. Moral responsibility pertaining to both meanings of morality is widely (but not unanimously) accepted by philosophers.

Building on moral responsibility, we finally reach moral blameworthiness, which allows us to "cast those who play games" one way or the other, or reserve judgement.

There are quate a few steps between [deducing that some video games, and indeed playing them, is morally significant] to [casting someone as 'objectively immoral']. Ask, however, that if there is an argument showing that torture is wrong, would we be justified in labelling a torturer with full mental and rational capacity and access to moral facts to be "objectively immoral"? If so, why wouldn't we be able to say the same if the papers I have cited make convincing arguments about video games and players of video games?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25187823

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/

[qsort]

> but no author to my knowledge has argued that video games and their players do not at least qualify for moral consideration

This is a weird phrasing, to be honest: if an author decides to write on a topic, by definition they believe the topic is worthy of consideration. By the same logic, by how niche this topic is, even by moral philosophy standards, we could deduce that most authors do not believe it is worthy of consideration?

Honestly AFAIK, the position that actions happening in a fictional scenario have no moral weight is the default and widely accepted one, with hardly any credible objections.

I couldn't read the papers you linked because they are paywalled. I'd be interested in hearing a dissenting opinion if you could outline one.

> but your usage of the concept in describing lotteries as unethical targets the descriptive sense - a code accepted by an individual or a community (...)

This is a distinction without a difference. Morality in the sense that "all rational people should accept it" is basically an empty set, AFAIK most of the philosophical arguments are "moral implications", i.e. if you accept X, then you should also accept Y; but it's dubious it's possible to make any moral judgement in the sense you require.

The root cause of my opposition to lotteries, etc. is the moral belief that it's unjust to reward or punish people on the basis of events or characteristics they have no way to control. This is a moral intuition, there is no way I can rationally convince you in a non-circular way that you should absolutely accept this fact. If you don't, the discussion is kind of over.

To make a different example, why do you oppose slavery? (I'm going to assume that you do) The most likely answer is a variation on "all humans have a natural right to self-determination", but why is that? Again, it's a moral intuition without any absolute justification.

> If so, why wouldn't we be able to say the same if the papers I have cited make convincing arguments about video games and players of video games?

Because I'm not convinced they do.

[claudiawerner]

>if an author decides to write on a topic, by definition they believe the topic is worthy of consideration.

This was not my point; rather, it would be possible for a philosopher to argue that they are not worthy of moral consideration, or not worthy in some way (but are worthy in others) - "worthy of moral consideration" refers to the object having moral properties, or that an activity is morally relevant. It does not mean that the topic isn't worth arguing about. For instance, some moral philosophers have argued that animals are not worthy of moral consideration.

>is the default and widely accepted one, with hardly any credible objections.

I don't think so. Consequentialist accounts of the morality of violent video games and even other media more generally cite arguments such as increasing aggression or anti-social behaviour. I'm not convinced the data is correct, but I think that among the general populace, some topics and actions are mff-limits morally blameworthy, such as engaging in a simulation in which it is your choice to molest children.

>This is a distinction without a difference.

It very much does make a difference, at the very least in the way we talk about morality. "It's against my ethical code" is not the reason you'd hear when you ask why someone disapproves of torture. "It's immoral" is what you'd hear, and it means something much stronger, something we act on in the world to the extent of restricting others, and the reason we have the state, courts, justice, the non-aggression principle, socialism, libertarianism, capitalism, and any other ideology or justice.

>Morality in the sense that "all rational people should accept it" is basically an empty set

The fact that no metaethical theory makes the case for you sufficiently does not mean that none of them do, and the same "choose your axioms" argument could me made just as well against, say, mathematics, identifying colours, epistemic standards, or logic itself. The only token that allows you to throw out the grounding of morality allows you to throw out anything else too. That's not to say moral facts necessarily exist, but many people take them to insofar as they provide for (almost) uncontroversial moral facts involving, say, slavery or torture.

There are very good arguments against morality in general, but "you can't prove any particular code of ethics is the right one a priori" is not one of them - the sophist's hammer is too blunt to be useful to me, you, or anyone else.

>This is a moral intuition, there is no way I can rationally convince you in a non-circular way that you should absolutely accept this fact. If you don't, the discussion is kind of over.

There is, assuming that we share systems with roughly the same results, just as you can convince me that A == A assuming we share similar logical systems, or that the earth is round assuming we seare similar epistemologies. They don't even have to be the same in order to rationally convince someone of internal consistency, which is what matters here.

>Again, it's a moral intuition without any absolute justification.

We could continue reducing the question down to a single basic statement of any ethical theory. That's not a problem, because although we may say on forums that morality is relative or descriptive/non-normative, we act as though it is objective and absolute, and we frequently ground our rational actions in that belief.

I'm sorry to say I don't think I'll do a good enough job of explaining or relaying the arguments against the immorality of video games more succintly than they have been made already, but here are PDF links to a good non-paywalled paper: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=18384555564403984...

The papers citing this one also do a good job of arguing that some video games can be immoral to play, but none are as high-level and cover as many ethical bases as this one. It's worth noting that even this author cannot say that video games are unworthy of moral consideration. "It's just a game" is by no means his approach here.

Edit: here is one such paper I cited in my other comment that argues the immorglity of certain multiplayer video games from a Kantian perspective: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-019-09498-y

[qsort]

> This was not my point

Fair enough, I misunderstood.

> increasing aggression or anti-social behaviour. > I'm not convinced the data is correct.

I'm not convinced the data is correct either. What are we talking about, then? It's a baseless claim, as empirical data shows.

> the reason we have the state, courts, justice...

The reason we have those things is that we have to coexist with other people. There is no necessary relation between state and ethics, nor there should be. Politics on a large scale is the result of interest groups with differing moral codes/interests/priorities pushing in various directions.

> There are very good arguments against morality in general...

I'm not trying to argue morality does or doesn't exist, it's not a question I find personally interesting, I was just claiming the request for morality to be universally grounded is unreasonable, we seem to agree there. I don't really have an objection to what you're saying.

Mathematics is very different because it's a formal language. One could view all mathematics as purely string manipulation. There's no requirement to agree on anything, not even the meaning of the symbols, except for a set of primitive concepts and a set of axioms. In a formal language you have proper definitions and checkable (even machine-checkable) proofs, a privilege that natural language doesn't enjoy.

> but here are PDF links

Much appreciated, I'll take a look.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "Before you rush to answer, ask yourself how you would feel about, say, a version of Transport Tycoon where you have to move Jews from the cities where they live to the concentration camps where they will die.""

Most people here have played Master of Orion. Recall that you can take over planets by either bombarding them with your ships, resulting in the death of the entire planetary population, or sending in troopships carrying your own population, resulting in the death of the some or all planetary population and/or some or all your own population committed to the assault.

I'd be surprised if more than a handful of players ever even gave the act a moment's thought before ordering the attack and I don't recall the ethics ever being brought up in any review or analysis.

[simion314]

>Further, I think it is unwise to brush aside any argument that the nature of the media we consume does not affect how we interact with the real world without consideration. Just because it turns out that old 90s arguments about DOOM turning us all into violent murderers was wrong doesn't mean that there aren't effects that might be harmful.

I think we should have learned our lesson and first gather some data before we ban war games, RPGs or Sims because some person has an hypothesis that maybe somewhere, someone would be "transformed" by the media into a criminal. I really don'w want some government or american christian dominated companies to start banning stuff.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Who's saying anything about banning anything? Neither the author of the article, nor I, am making a case for that. I merely think the idea that the media we engage with has some effect on us is not one we should dismiss out of hand just because we all have bad memories of Jack Thompson's crusade.

[simion314]

Sure media has an effect, sometimes is used for propaganda like the patriotic movies.

So now we both agree that media has an effect. What is the next step, we either find a scientific way to measure the effects and then create laws if the effects are bad. The alternative is to use media to propagate some outrage that the media we don't like maybe has some effects that we don't like.

So do you have a proposal on how to measure the effects and who decides what should be allowed and what should not be allowed?

I propose we look at the last decades, see that the number of gamers increased but there is no correlation with crime , but if you are soem student or scientist I invite you to find such correlation and prove there is some effect.

I am not sure about this game but there could exist there in the world some games that are very immoral or unethical . but if there is no actual real life measurable bad effect we should focus on stuff that we can see the effects like lootboxes or social media/

[mcguire]

"What is the next step, we either find a scientific way to measure the effects and then create laws if the effects are bad."

There are two problems.

1. No (interesting :-)) questions have simple clear answers. Sometimes, propaganda is good. Context matters, as do a lot of variables that are either prohibitively difficult to address scientifically or to legally control for effectively. (Let's say that X (a form of media, say) is perfectly harmless unless you have a certain set of genetic values. Requiring a whole-genome assay before you could interact with X would be theoretically unlike banning X, but practically?) Further, there are plenty of things that I don't like[TM], but which I wouldn't care to make laws about.

2. The environment changes continuously. How do you decide what your personal take on X is, in the absence of concrete and final scientific data on the effects of X? Knowing the future is hard, by the way.

The area of inquire of the article, and of asking those questions, is moral philosophy, and it's goal is to provide an individual with the tools to make decisions[1] in the absence of hard data and with the knowledge that other decisions are completely legitimate.

There's no one here other than you talking about banning things. And, honestly, "do what thou wilt until there is concrete proof of physical harm" is a valid ethical approach, although I don't know of anyone who subscribes to it and it has some poor consequences. (Are lootboxes and social media unequivocally bad? Good? Are the consequences such that legal action is required?)

[1] To any philosophers who wish to disagree: Fight me! I'll immanentize your escutcheon, you cheese-headed babbadook!

[simion314]

Sorry i went directly to banning things, but remember rock music and video games were not banned but the media outrage had a lot of bad effects. So my concern is that is easy to create hypothesis that are not backed by science that can cause bad effects.

Edit: I am not against discussing this topic, we need to make sure what is fact and what is just some hypothesis/fantasy. If we discuss it then we should have some goal, can we measure something, can we look at the past and conclude something or we are just either wasting our time or try to spread some ideology that is not backed by evidence.

[watwut]

I think thay ability to discuss this topic is important part of free speech.

[kazagistar]

The fact that the consequences are cleansed away makes it not remotely historical. You aren't playing a subset of history, you are playing a subset of propaganda.

[feoren]

You're not playing a subset of history nor a subset of propaganda: you're playing a simple tactical game about tanks.

[3pt14159]

Eh. I get it. The nazis put my family through hell. Playing as them would make me feel shitty too.

[jayjader]

For the sake of discussion: > It's just moving bits around in a computer.

Once it's dressed up as making Nazi Germany win the 2nd World War with as little tact as the author makes it out to have, it's no longer "just" moving bits around in a computer. It's also about the story we're telling about and through these bits. Are you claiming that a raw output of memory along with the concrete mathematical operations you can apply to it would suffice in satisfying your urge to play [Panzer General]? Does the visual & narrative dressing not play a role in your interest (or others') in the game?

It's probably not harmful for most "well-adjusted" individuals (whatever that can mean); nonetheless I think it's important to talk about how much the piece of media encourages (or fails to encourage) mindfulness towards what it represents. Even more so for interactive media like video games.

I further agree with the author that we can't look at an instance of this in the void; it is important to consider what's happening in the world at large. With all that has been said on the "Clean Wehrmact", consider what role this game might have had in further propagating that narrative in, for example, kids looking for a fun wargame to play without yet having knowledge of what happened in WW2.