Making real choices in a virtual world
Note: This is the first of two papers on similar themes. (Read the second here.) I wrote both in the second year of my MA in English at Bob Jones University, the fundamentalist Christian school I attended for my BA and MA. Both capture well the moral tenor of my upbringing and of my beliefs at that time. I was raised in evangelicalism and on a diet of Rush Limbaugh. But since that time and these writings, some of my views have changed in important ways. In regards to the argument of this paper, the most significant change is that I have lost my former confidence in the Bible as the absolute, objective moral frame of reference for humans. As a result, the core imperative of this paper no long works for me. However, I still to this day embrace and affirm the central observation that a person’s moral decisions in a virtual space or video game are not without implications for their real-world thinking about morality. I still believe what we pretend to think or do can affect what we actually think and do in the real world. (DL, Sept. 18, 2021)
In September 1987, Captain Picard’s Enterprise-D embarked on its maiden voyage. Captain James T. Kirk and his cronies had been replaced by a new crew with a new ship and new gadgets. Perhaps the most memorable of those new gadgets was a new kind of shipboard recreation chamber: the holodeck. A virtual-reality chamber featuring cutting-edge 24th-century technology, the holodeck used holograms, force fields, and semi-stable matter to create alternate realities indistinguishable from the real thing. It was a room where dreams came to life, and it quickly captured the imagination of Trekkers everywhere. Before long, the “holodeck” became verbal shorthand for the supreme realization of virtual reality.
The holodeck was born at a time when the idea of virtual reality was rapidly impressing itself upon public consciousness. For the previous decade, computer technology had been developing at an almost unbelievable rate, and for the first time the technology needed to create virtual “worlds” was more than speculative. Today, almost fifteen years later, it’s even less speculative, and as video game consoles, computer games, and high-bandwidth Internet connections continually up the ante on interactive entertainment, society is examining ever more closely the benefits, and dangers, that virtual reality offers.
The pleasures of virtual reality are almost self-evident. With virtual reality, any thing you can imagine, you can do. Always wanted to see the Taj Mahal? No problem. Wish you’d fought in the Crusades? It’s not too late. Want to fly wingman with Luke Skywalker? You can. The Force is with you. Hypothetically, there isn’t any experience that can’t be simulated with fully developed VR technology. With it you can create your own perfect existence. And while today’s technology is far from immersive, there are many people already bending the definition of reality with the technology that is available.
Earlier this year, Electronic Arts, a staple video game manufacturer for over a decade, introduced a revolutionary new computer game: The Sims. The Sims offers the player the opportunity to micro-manage the lives of a virtual “family.” He designs characters (choosing everything from appearance to personality) and guides them through their daily lives. Social behavior, work habits, even personal hygiene are all governed by the player. The player creates virtual lives in a virtual society, and while he doesn’t actually experience the virtual reality he creates, he does participate in it through a kind of virtual voyeurism—an engaging voyeurism similar (very similar) to the voyeurism of TV shows like Big Brother.
Obviously the absolute power available to the player lends itself to abuse. The Sims features adultery, nudity, and even lesbianism. But this sim porn is but one aspect of the moral morass with which VR tempts gamers.
Practically speaking, reality is in the mind. It is the individual mind, through the senses, that grasps hold of empirical data and constructs reality. Given the objective reality of real-world data, an unknown family that lives two states away may be more real than a sim family, but which is more real to the gamer? Despite that fact that it’s really nothing more than a stream of binary data somewhere in the digital ether, a sim family has being in the player’s mind. The characters have personality. They act. He will remember them, just as he remembers real people. As the player begins to attribute to electron streams a brand of being that merits his attention and decision-making skills, the line between reality and virtual reality begins to blur. The mind is presented with multiple environments in which to act.
Several popular films have in recent years have developed the dangers of this blurring to the ultimate extreme. Both The Matrix and eXistenZ (Spring releases in 1999) took a penetrating look at what happens when pseduo-reality becomes so convincing that people begin to lose track of what’s real and what’s a game. In eXistenZ, especially, the audience is asked to consider what makes real reality different from the perfect virtual reality. If you can’t tell there’s a difference, is there any practical difference? Or in other words, if reality is the environment in which we act, isn’t any environment in which we act real?
In the virtual “game” world in eXistenZ action isn’t always natural.Characters often act based on uncontrollable impulses imposed upon them by the computer-designed characters they play within the game. These computer-led actions shape the course of events and help the player figure out the point of the game (which is itself the point of the game). But even though the real person wasn’t coerced to do anything in a real world, he felt like he was. Action feels equally real in both worlds, and in fact, throughout the film the audience is unsure when the characters are in the game and when they’re not. This uncertainty persists to the very end.
But such confusion, the film points out, is very dangerous because people often feel free to act very differently in a virtual world that lacks consequences. At one point within the eXistenZ game world, one of the main characters randomly shoots a waiter, an acceptable act in the game. But at the end of the film the same character shoots a person outside the game. He then turns his gun on bystanders who, instead of cowering, underscore the film’s point by blithely assuming that they are still within the game.
Our VR capabilities can’t create the game world of eXistenZ, but even low-tech alternatives like computer games can create for us a world in which we can act. And when we act, we don’t have to abide by the codes that bind us in the real world. As players mow down opponents with gattling guns, as they pillage cities, as they allow their sims to engage in soap-opera promiscuity, they are making real moral choices. If the fact that those poor choices don’t bring consequences leads to the conclusion that the poor choices don’t matter, so much the worse.
Scripture makes it clear that our choices always count. “And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father” (Col. 3:17). Unfortunately, because we are the closest thing to God in the amoral VR environment, we often think our opinion is the only one that matters. As we fall for that lie, we reinforce our natural tendency to throw off divine restraints and follow our own impulses, a dangerous habit that will result in the most unpleasant of consequences when death finally removes the last VR helmet and leaves us blinking in the Real World.