On Forced Empathy in the Magic Circle

Update: this post has received a substantial rewrite. While the rewritten material replaces the original on the first page, the original material still exists on page 2.

I just read this recent piece by Ed Smith which talks about, among other things, the dreaded ludonarrative dissonance, and I find myself relating to a particularly frustrating aspect of my day job a little bit differently because of it.

I imagine that at every job where dealing with customers is a thing, there is a part of the job training (if there is any) where the instructor will stand before the group of new employees and talk for hours about soft skills – the behavioral mechanisms statistically proven (so says corporate) to make employees better at handling customers. And if that is the case, there is a part of this soft skills section which explicitly talks about having empathy for customers’ plights, no matter what the situation is, no matter how silly you might think the situation is.

Nobody likes this. The instructor doesn’t like it but is forced to deliver what corporate has provided; the new employees don’t like it because 1) they know what empathy is and 2) it’s just a job. No matter what the instructional material says, everyone knows how much/little they are going to be gung-ho about their state of affairs.

But the charade is played out anyway. The instructor will talk about active listening and personality cues to look/listen for, will try to drive home the point about making a connection with the customer so they feel listened to, knowing full well that another part of the training will deal with how to handle bigots, belligerents, creepers and bomb threats, and they will have to teach that part with no apparent cognitive dissonance at all. The new hires will sit there diligently because they’re getting paid for sitting here.

The problem with this charade, at least in Smith’s formulation as it applies to emotional affect and pseudoimportant choices in video games, is that it simply will not ever work because the new hire/player and the employer/writer knows that none of this is real. As Smith says right there in the title of his piece: “It doesn’t matter.” The magic circle, such as it’s formulated, never truly closes. On some level, the player understands that the video game narrative is completely predetermined, and therefore no choices hold actual moral weight.

You know when you play a game that it isn’t real. You know the people who made it know absolutely nothing about you. So whatever assertions the game might make about you as a player, or as us, as players, as a concept, their impact is bound to be — or probably ought to be — very very low, because although you might care and think about how your decisions affect the narrative or the characterisation of your avatar, you’re not making those judgements primarily based on who you are; it’s not you or anything to do with you on the line, it’s just the experience or cogency or depth of the game you’re playing that might be affected. This idea of a videogame, which will expressly, repeatedly iterate that it takes place in a completely artificial world, marked by the fact that even death has no consequences since you can always respawn back into life, or load up to stop some other character from dying, or anything consequential based on your actions from happening at all, offering some kind of assessment of your real-life, actual morality is absurd.^[1]“IT DOESN’T MATTER WHEN YOU KILL ALL THE CIVILIANS.” RESTLESS DREAMS, 18 Feb. 2021, https://restlessdreamsbook.com/2021/02/18/it-doesnt-matter-when-you-kill-all-the-civilians/.

Smith believes that the player is functionally “unmoral” as opposed to moral or amoral when they play a video game, “because the abstraction between their actions and the world where the consequences of those actions is played out is so superlatively designed, and the artifice and immateriality and inconsequentiality so apparent and accepted[…] that it’d be like judging somebody based entirely on what they think or imagine or sometimes dream about.” For Smith, bombing all of the civilians in Spec Ops: The Line amounts to a “mechanical action,” the same as “turning a page in a book.” Thinking about my own relationships with games (Destiny 2 in particular), it is true that committing mass genocide of multiple alien races has basically amounted to a “weekly chore” to me.

From the perspective of the narrative, this makes sense. As Smith says, expecting a reader to find themselves morally culpable for killing someone via turning the page in an Agatha Christie thriller would be ridiculous. And yet I still find myself disagreeing with this framework, fundamentally.

Smith ends his piece by saying “There’s a really great story in Spec Ops: The Line, a tragedy of men and ego and trauma and misunderstanding. But all of that remains ignored because games, in so many different ways, have always told us that we are the most important element within them and what we want and what we do is above all, and it’s resulted in this boring, navel-gazing, dead-end, masturbating-and-crying-at-the-same-time, paradoxical flagellatory narcissism where the most vital and fascinating point of discussion is always the moral consequence and complexity of the player, which I suppose these disruptions and observations about form, and gimmicky attacks on the audience’s psychology, are easier for game developers to compose than anything so wildly unsuited to the medium as a consistent and meaningful character.”

In other words, the new employees know the corporate instructor is spewing bullshit, and so does the instructor, and both go along with it despite disagreeing with the idea from Corporate that any of this shit will really work. In fact, most of it won’t, but Smith’s conclusion extrapolated out is that there is no value to ever believing any of it, and in fact the whole enterprise has harmed us collectively. By believing that games narratives can provide us with a moral statement or be in any way a judge of ethical character, we have become “navel-gazing,” “flagellatory,” “narcissistic.”

But if you’ve ever worked a shitty customer service job, you know that sometimes making a connection with your customer can make the interaction less terrible than it would be otherwise. That simply employing the mindset your bored-to-tears corporate instructor imparted, of “look, boil this down to, ‘imagine how you would feel or what you would do if you were in your customer’s position’ and go from there,” does actually work to keep the worst of people calling customer service at bay. It doesn’t make everything okay, but it does help even slightly as a framework. That is to say, I think it’s possible for games to ask moral questions of the player, and for the player to consider those questions and gain something from that, without being a “self-flagellatory narcissist” in the process.

To bring it back to game studies basics, the rules of the game might be silly, but they are still considered to be important when we enter the magic circle.

Developers count on our buy-in upon entry to the magic circle in order for their narrative constructions to land properly, which I believe is the ultimate issue Smith takes with games like Spec Ops: The Line and Bioshock, and potentially even a game like The Last of Us Part II.

In a game which isn’t explicitly trying to Make You Examine Your Choices above simply telling the story it wants to tell, like, say… a Yakuza title, you can enter and exit the magic circle, you can immerse yourself in the game world, without bearing/being asked to bear any of the moral responsibility of sending 450 yakuza lowlifes to the hospital for picking a fight on your way to clean a Sotenbori takoyaki stand out of fried octopus. You do not become Kazuma Kiryu by temporarily embodying him, and he is distinct from you at all times narratively. The quality of the story is not lesser for not trying to psychologically manipulate you.

In a game like The Last of Us Part II you similarly do not become Ellie or Abby, but the game depends on you internalizing their decisions and their actions as if you had. (Actually, I’m genuinely not even sure that the game itself is really dependent on this — rather, I get the sense that the only one who really needs you to feel the guilt of killing Dr. Butters the (angry, attacking) Golden Retriever for some reason is… Neil Druckmann, but that’s just the impression that I get.) You are rewarded for this with slight dialogue shifts and oblique references to your actions, and hardly anything tidally important. All of the major stuff is left for the writing team to set in stone.

Even games with pretty robust choice-consequence systems fall apart at a certain pressure applied by Smith’s framework. Games like Undertale and Dishonored, which do apply pretty major changes to the gameplay and narrative based on player actions, do so along preset lines. It was pretty clever of TobyFox to make Undertale remember your choices and call you out on them even between game resets, but ultimately the light scolding you receive for checking out every aspect of the game has dissuaded basically no one from doing so. Someone with sufficient curiosity and no attachment to cartoon characters whatsoever would likely have no qualms at all doing the so-called “No Mercy” run, and they wouldn’t be morally reprehensible for doing so. Hell, guide writers do exist. They’re just playing a fuckin video game, not taking on the sins of all the Gamers in this world like some kind of underpaid freelance Jesus figure.

The main thing about Smith’s phenomenological framework as he presents it is that it is a) personal, b) not explicitly universal and c) applicable only insofar as the decision has already been made to buy and play the game in the first place. It says, while playing the game, there is nothing in the narrative or gameplay that would cause him to conflate the mechanical actions he took – that any combination of quick time event buttons he mashed during a scripted action sequence could be on the same moral level as – the corresponding actions of the character. Smith’s framework – and his essay – has nothing at all to say on the ethics of buying or making a video game.

In fact, to make the assumption that it is always good to make a video game, regardless of content, and that it is always good to buy said game ends up putting a great deal of pressure on the player and the act of playing in exactly the way Smith intimates is bad. It’s saying, “up until now, there have been no moral quandaries, no Major Decisions you have to make. By buying the game the developers have made, you agree completely with whatever they wrote, and now you have to deal with the consequences.” And that’s just not how we make these decisions – it’s how politicians decide GTAV is somehow responsible for a rise in carjacking rates in Chicago, but not at all how game players actually interact with games.

And just like Smith’s framework is not meant to be universally applied or adopted, there’s nothing I could say here that would work to answer these questions across the board. Except this: it is important that we do the work of consciously building these frameworks, both within the context Smith was talking about and outside of it.

Pages: 1 2