Behind the Line: Doom – Playing with Moral Consideration

BTL

Doom 2016 is a fun time. Driving metal music accompanies raucous action and gore. What makes it so satisfying? Yes, the game play is well tuned and viscerally rewarding, but there’s more going on here as well.

Doom alternative cover art

They don’t have nearly enough demons to take this guy down.

 

Justification

I often say about Wolfenstein, Doom’s sister franchise, that it taught me that the only thing better than gold is Nazi gold, because you have to kill Nazis to get it. No reasonable person spares any concern for the fate of a militant Nazi. We kill them and feel not only justified, not just unrepentant, but jubilant! In Doom, though, we’re not even fighting humans, we’re fighting demons from hell! The concept feels so just, so righteous, that it adds to the satisfaction of the action. No matter when we rip a demon’s tooth out to stab its brain, or literally rip it in half. They are demons!

Philosophy

We can explain our exhilaration in part through some philosophical reasoning. Crash Course – Philosophy’s episode on Personhood explains this well. They explain that one interpretation of personhood is inclusion in our moral community, or being worth moral consideration. If I consider you a person, on any level, you are deserving of moral consideration. How you define a person? They cite Peter Singer for one view, and explain:

“The key to personhood is sentience, the ability to feel pleasure and pain.”

This view says that it is wrong to cause unnecessary pain to anything that can feel, but if it can’t feel, well, we do no harm by excluding it from the group of beings that matter.

Demons seem to feel pleasure and pain. So do they deserve moral consideration? Is it wrong to cause them pain? Hank Green continues:

Some people think that personhood is a right, a sort of ticket to the moral community that you forfeit when you violate the laws of society in a major way. In this view, you can surrender your personhood through grossly inhumane actions.

In Doom it is clear that these demons aren’t simply somehow misunderstood. It is quite overtly clear that they are evil, and have murdered the workers at the facility. There is no way that we as players can see them as remotely sympathetic. They are barbarous, murderous, and evil. Their actions are horrific and disqualifies them from personhood. Therefore we are not obligated to give them any moral consideration. We can treat them however we like, and we do. We’re even rewarded for gruesome glory kills, or using a chainsaw to rip and tear their flesh.

Until it is done!

Psychology

This leads us to one of the fascinating aspects of video games. This is a world constructed where our enemies deserve no moral consideration. We could kill them, mutilate them, desecrate them in any way we choose, and feel completely justified in doing so. It’s not only fine, but right for us to smile a predatory smile when we finally weaken a large enemy to the point we can rip a piece out of it and stuff it down his throat making it explode.

It isn’t uncommon for people to have violent thoughts or fantasies. I’d like to fight my boss. I’d like to get revenge on my childhood bully. Whatever. One of the reasons we don’t do it is because no matter how angry or tempted we are, we know that acting on them is immoral. The targets are people who deserve that moral consideration. We may have no concern about how much pleasure or pain they are experiencing, we may wish for them to experience pain, and we may even hear that they are in pain and feel tremendous schadenfreude. However we know that we are not justified in CAUSING the pain. So, we don’t act on it, for the good of society.

That doesn’t mean that those feelings go away, though. We want to express them in some way. A game like Doom gives us an outlet. Many games are violent, but cartoony, and not satisfying in the way this feeling calls for. Other games are violent, and realistic, but against people who are, on some level, worthy of at least a sliver of moral consideration. Doom, on the other hand, is realistic, or at least not cartoony, and again it is completely appropriate for us to chainsaw through a demon’s skull while it’s alive.

Power Fantasy

Many games run on power fantasy. Doom does a great job of accentuating this with its particular method of encouraging active combat. If you’re hurt badly, kill a demon and you get more health back. Low on ammo, and killing may give you ammo as well. Furthermore, the game makes it clear that YOU are what the DEMONS are afraid of. YOU are the monster under the bed for THEM. As a player, you know they are afraid of you, you know they don’t deserve any pity, mercy, or compassion, and you know you have the tools to dispose of them. Furthermore, if you want you can make the challenge quite stiff. This makes the visceral excitement more rewarding when we defeat the enemies and reach a checkpoint.

Sublimation

Everything I’ve said so far sounds like it could have been from notorious and disgraced anti-game lawyer Jack Thompson. A different spin on these points, and you could say that this would desensitize someone to violence, making them more prone to committing violent acts. I propose another interpretation. This is a modern option of sublimation.

Ruby Heart, MvC 2

No, not this sublimation, but props if you get the reference.

If we have feelings that we may want to be violent, or vindictive, or cruel, a video game gives us a safe place to express and explore those feelings. We can treat other “beings” without any moral consideration, as violent and brutal as we like, and feel completely morally right in doing so in this constructed world. But what of the Doom Slayer? Does his thoroughly inhumane treatment of the demons violate any moral law? If you knew someone who was capable of what he does, or what you have him do in the game, would you be a little nervous around them? Does this sacrifice some of his personhood in our consideration?

The Other Side of the Coin

We may cheer Doom guy’s killing of demons, even take pleasure in the brutality of it, but at the same time we can see he is doing this to living, animate creatures. We don’t feel compassion for their suffering, but it’s apparent that we are crossing a line. In the world of Doom these acts are justified, but still terrible. We’re separated enough, and the world is fictional enough, that we can remove any of our own moral considerations for the demons, but we DO see the horror of these actions as well. Furthermore, we do see Olivia and Samuel, and how their acts brought this about.

There are enough reflections here to keep us grounded in a moral reality, rather than losing ourselves in the power fantasy, and carrying this warped, impossible view into real life. It remains limited to the world of entertainment, and therefore is its own form of sublimation.

Games can take us places, make us feel things, and give us experiences that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to. These can be amusing, therapeutic, enlightening, or even disturbing. And that’s just like any other art form.

And with all that said, go check out Axalon’s playthrough!

 


Kynetyk is a veteran of the games industry.  Behind the Line is written to help improve understanding of what goes on in the game development process and the business behind it.  From “What’s taking this game so long to release”, to “why are there bugs”, to “Why is this free to play” or anything else, if there is a topic that you would like to see covered, please write in to kynetyk@enthusiacs.com

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