Ethics and Morality

Gamer - Widescreen Subtitle AC3 Dolby Dts Reality and video games merge in this high-concept sci-fi action thriller from Crank creators Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. In the not too distant future, mind-control technology allows humans to control the actions and movements of other humans, allowing reclusive billionaire Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall) to create the ultimate video game. It's called "Slayers," and it's a mass-scale, multiplayer online first-person shooter that's as controversial as it is popular. In the world of gamers, Simon (Logan Lerman) is a rock star; miraculously managing to keep his character alive week after week, he racks up frags like Billy Mitchell jumps barrels. But unlike Mitchell's Mario, Simon's video-game avatar is a living, breathing human being named Kable (Gerard Butler). Defying the odds to keep Kable running and gunning though even the most explosive battles, Simon captures the imagination of a global audience. Torn from his family, thrown into prison, and forced to fight against his will, Kable realizes that his only hope of ever seeing his family again is to somehow escape the game, reclaim his identity, and expose Castle's dehumanizing technology on live television. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Art is a reflection of life. I recently watched Gamer, a movie and piece of art reflecting the human condition.  The movie, like Golding's Lord of the Flies explores the relationship between the realms of beasts and higher life-forms, or more appropriately the struggle all humans have with being both beasts and higher life-forms.

Golding guides the reader through this struggle by transporting the reader to a mysterious island untouched by such concepts as ethics and morality, good and evil.  Some of the boys escape reality by donning masks - a disconnect between the id and super-ego.  Let us assume for my purposes that the super-ego is established through socialization rather than some inherent or God-given quality.  Although I believe that socialization is a God-given instrument designed for the sole purpose of developing the individual super-ego.

Gamer examines the internal human battle through the use of games, ever-evolving real-world fantasies accessible to all rather than an individual dream-scape of ink and paper, finite and dated.  I speculate that the game World of Warcraft generates more revenue in one year than Lord of the Flies has produced since it's first printing.

The success of games is that they provide the opportunity to escape the real world and live vicariously through an virtual persona. This persona, I believe, is an accurate depiction of an individual's id. Since the gaming community, particularly RPG's and MMO's (and, of course, MMORPG's), accepts and embraces both good and evil the id is allowed to romp freely.

The Sim's 3 is a game available today in which the player maintains a virtual person in every aspect of human life from where they live to what they eat, when they shower, what they wear, and with whom they mate.  What if these people were real, not a series of 1's and 0's processed by a complex machine?  Gamer explores this very concept.

In the movie a player controls all actions of a real person who has voluntarily traded his/her civil liberties for money and literally mindless slavery.  The players in the movie are responsible for maintaining their playee much like The Sims 3.  The writer/directors of Gamer, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, delve into the consequences of freeing the id as the players delve into despicable depths of depravity in a world where real and virtual have lost meaning.  The "real" people are virtual sociopaths restricted to the confines of their audio-visual cocoons whereas the real virtual people are condemned to continuous drugs, sex, and violence in the actual sunshine world only to be relieved when the "real" people should rest due to exhaustion and/or boredom.  This is what I found disturbing.

How long until human fantasies become realities?  I'm not referring to deep space exploration and genetic manipulation - those are technological possibilities.  I mean how long before the laud of life and liberty are lost, and we embrace the cocoon of the machine?

-Kyle Warren
10/25/2010