Fire Arrow on 16/1/2024 at 14:45
I didn't see a thread where it was appropriate to ask this question (I'd be happy to delete it if there is already an appropriate thread). In another thread, Anarchic Fox mentioned that their virtue ethics was influenced by Ultima, and thought it would make for a good discussion.
So I'll put the question to anyone interested "how does virtue ethics relate to Ultima?"
Thirith on 16/1/2024 at 15:32
From Ultima IV onwards, the Ultima series of RPGs had multiple systems of virtues and ethics that were expressed in their worlds, especially the game world Britannia's list of eight virtues: Honesty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, Sacrifice, Honor, Spirituality, and Humility. In Ultima IV, the player character aspired to become the Avatar, the living embodiment of these virtues; in Ultima V the Avatar returns to Britannia to find that the virtues have been corrupted into twisted versions of themselves.
There's more to be said about Ultima and the virtues, but that's a very brief, rough summary of virtues and ethics in Ultima.
Fire Arrow on 16/1/2024 at 15:41
Sounds Aristotelian. Like the classic example of courage being between cowardice and recklessness. I wonder whether they thought of using the seven classical virtues originally, and decided to change it?
Sulphur on 16/1/2024 at 16:38
I think you mean Ultima was influenced by virtue ethics, not the other way around? As far as I understand it, the Ultima series brought in its system of virtues as a reaction to games at the time not having a particular moral code for players to follow (this included Ultimas I-III), and the hullabaloo during the 80s about games corrupting the youth playing them. The system's not necessarily Aristotelian in the manner through which it was created, but there are connections at a broader level.
Inasmuch as the system itself was instituted in U4, it was on the principles of alignment with the virtues; the game helps you create your Avatar (capitalised because you're literally called The Avatar, an embodiment of the virtues) by asking you to answer a series of ethical dilemmas at the beginning, and your responses determined which one you were most aligned to, and thus your starting class - if you chose the way of honour, for instance, you'd start out as a paladin. V was a bit of an interrogation of this system by turning it upside down, and was generally well-received. 6 looked at how your actions as the Avatar themselves could be a source of conflict, and examined said conflict with some more shades of grey than you'd have in a standard RPG at the time.
Interestingly enough, Richard Garriott (the creator of the series) is a self-described 'ethical hedonist'. He's spoken about it in various places, but (
https://uo.stratics.com/secrets/books/book_11.shtml) here's a brief thing that explains his POV about it; on his way to the conclusion, he does more or less say that morals born from age-old tradition rather than rational truths (i.e., the Ultima virtues) aren't a good enough system.
Pyrian on 16/1/2024 at 16:43
Ultima IV's virtue system is weirdly geometric. There's three principles, Truth, Love, and Courage, and each of the eight virtues is a set of those three: Honesty, Compassion, and Valor are each one respectively, Justice is Truth+Love, Sacrifice is Love+Courage, and Honor is Truth+Courage, Spirituality is all 3, and Humility is none of the above, described as the foundation of the other virtues. And then Truth, Love, and Courage also correspond to Int, Dex, and Str respectively, lol, so you adjust your build based on which shrine you level up at.
When Ultima IV came out, it was rather unusual for a videogame to have anything to say anything about ethics at all, nevermind to do so mechanically and track certain aspects of people's behavior. Supposedly it was a reaction to the fact that in Ultima III, the by-far most efficient way to win the game was mass theft (you needed enormous sums of gold to increase ability scores in U3, and the easiest way to get that gold were some loaded merchants with inadequate security), and I guess Garriott was disappointed at the gusto with which players went at it, lol.
EDIT:
Quote Posted by Sulphur
...if you chose the way of honour, for instance, you'd start out as a paladin.
This was an
awful system, BTW, because the classes were in NO WAY balanced and the game mechanics push you to play solo for a good chunk of the early game (encounters scale to party size but rewards don't!). Heaven forbid you pick Humility, and spawn as a Shepherd with no combat abilities worth mentioning and no magic whatsoever.
Fire Arrow on 16/1/2024 at 16:54
Quote Posted by Sulphur
I think you mean Ultima was influenced by virtue ethics, not the other way around? As far as I understand it, the Ultima series brought in its system of virtues as a reaction to games at the time not having a particular moral code for players to follow (this included Ultimas I-III), and the hullabaloo during the 80s about games corrupting the youth playing them. The system's not necessarily Aristotelian in the manner through which it was created, but there are connections at a broader level.
I'm sorry, I used 'their' because I wasn't sure what pronoun to use for Anarchic Fox. He/she/they said their own ethical system was a kind of virtue ethics, influenced by Ultima.
Quote:
Interestingly enough, Richard Garriott (the creator of the series) is a self-described 'ethical hedonist'. He's spoken about it in various places, but (
https://uo.stratics.com/secrets/books/book_11.shtml) here's a brief thing that explains his POV about it; on his way to the conclusion, he does more or less say that morals born from age-old tradition rather than rational truths (i.e., the Ultima virtues) aren't a good enough system.
That seems like it would be opposed to virtue ethics. I wonder what Anarchic Fox meant?
Sulphur on 16/1/2024 at 17:46
Quote Posted by Fire Arrow
I'm sorry, I used 'their' because I wasn't sure what pronoun to use for Anarchic Fox. He/she/they said their own ethical system was a kind of virtue ethics, influenced by Ultima.
Ah, my bad.
Quote:
That seems like it would be opposed to virtue ethics. I wonder what Anarchic Fox meant?
I don't think Garriott's personal preferences render the idea itself invalid. The games offer different perspectives, and as we all well know, moral codes aren't perfectly able to circumscribe our worlds and our actions within them - unless you use an absolute system like a Kantian one, and even then it's about making a generalisable construct rather than dealing with every possible ethical scenario on its own terms. But I'd rather not speak for AF, I'm sure they'll be responding by and by.
Quote Posted by Pyrian
EDIT:This was an
awful system, BTW, because the classes were in NO WAY balanced and the game mechanics push you to play solo for a good chunk of the early game (encounters scale to party size but rewards don't!). Heaven forbid you pick Humility, and spawn as a Shepherd with no combat abilities worth mentioning and no magic whatsoever.
It was definitely
interesting. Imagine going for justice and becoming a druid without knowing that was how the game was rolling out the starting point of your adventure. I think there's ways to make it work better if the game could accommodate say, non-violence for a Shepherd build, but it wasn't really built that way. I do want to hear whether Shepherd essentially made the game Hard Mode for the bemused folks who ended up with it.
Pyrian on 16/1/2024 at 17:59
My first game I ended up with a Tinker (I picked Sacrifice in the quiz because it just seemed more virtuous), and that's a lot better than a Shepherd and yet still quite awful compared to a Paladin. I did try being a Shepherd once, but not only do you start as the weakest character, you also start on a desolate island with nothing but a literal ghost town. IIRC, you have to wait for a pirate ship to spawn, somehow kill the crew, and take their ship, just to start the game. (Maybe there was a moongate? I don't think so, but I could be wrong, it's been a long time.)
Fire Arrow on 16/1/2024 at 18:07
Quote Posted by Sulphur
I don't think Garriott's personal preferences render the idea itself invalid. The games offer different perspectives, and as we all well know, moral codes aren't perfectly able to circumscribe our worlds and our actions within them - unless you use an absolute system like a Kantian one, and even then it's about making a generalisable construct rather than dealing with every possible ethical scenario on its own terms. But I'd rather not speak for AF, I'm sure they'll be responding by and by.
I not necessarily pointing to a problem within Garriot's perspective, more I'm interested in the interpretation. In my understanding virtue ethics is something quite distinct from consequentialism. But to be fair I'm not a fan of consequentialism. (I oscillated between Aristotle and Kant for a long time before becoming a Hegelian.)
demagogue on 16/1/2024 at 21:32
I wouldn't say Ultima was any contribution to philosophical discussion of virtue ethics, but I think it's fair to say it was the forefather of games using ethics as a mechanic or that ties them up with objectives, which we've seen in Fallout, Dishonored, Prey, etc.
I have an opinion about the value of immersive sims, though, which runs against, if not is entirely antithetical, to this part of the imm-sim tradition from Origin to Arkane & their offshoots. I think some part of that tradition could still be consistent, but let me explain. (Apologies if I'm extending this beyond just Ultima, but Ultima and Origin were the, well, origin of this tradition, and I think this is where the discussion is naturally pointing towards anyway.)
In my understanding of an imm-sim, the whole idea is you don't want there to be a "God" behind the game wanting you to read their mind to solve whatever puzzle will unlock salvation in the game's soteriology, where the game world itself responds to the virtue of the player. The idea is the game world just has systems that just do their thing objectively, there is no inherit right or wrong in the game world itself, but players chooses themselves what kind of person they'll be in that world, and the game lets them do it. Gameplay is about playing systems to solve environmental problems (granted that may include playing human psychology, like overtaking guards), not guessing verbs or riddles or puzzles or virtue-signaling rituals that bake a value system into the world itself.
That said, I think in that kind of world, you can and it's even a benefit to the game to have characters in the world that care about ethics and respond appropriately. In that case, being fraudulent (making people believe you're honest when you aren't in hidden places) is still a viable strategy. But that's how I think virtue ethics can still get in the back door. But I think that about the real world too. Virtue ethics has to come from within when it's in a world that's empty of ethics outside.
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So I'll tell you what I really don't like. I hate the movie Pleasantville, where the movie world itself turned to color when a character did a virtuous thing in the world's opinion. For one thing, I thought its version of virtue was really superficial, and I was upset with the God of that world that They'd pander to that level of superficiality, when, you know, growing up studying virtue ethics as a lot of us philosophy types do, it's supposed to aspire to a higher level, nothing impossible or superhuman, but it doesn't reward lazy thinking.
In that same vein, I didn't like that the game world itself in Dishonored changed based on the players' ethics throughout the game. Thief did it with the no kill objective, not the world itself, but you still failed the mission. (Again, if it'd been just a change in major characters that had access to the relevant info, that might have been okay.) I definitely wouldn't like the player's class, much less race!, being chosen by their ethical type, since again part of being in a totally free world is that anybody born into any situation can aspire to any ethics. It's about human choice, not Providence.
All of this I think of as important in my thinking about both game worlds and the real world. I'm happy to see characters in game worlds caring a lot about virtue ethics. I'm unhappy seeing the game world itself care. That's part of the more general imm-sim mainstay that the game world shouldn't care about the player at all, but go on as if they weren't there, but the player can play systems in that world.
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Edit: Okay, I have a more nuanced position, especially in my work on the Stealth Score for Darkmod. I will grant it can be good for the game, not to respond to the player's ethics directly, as in the world literally changes based on the ethics or the player passes or fails a level only because of it (cf. Thief's no kill objective again), but I think it can be good for the game to track and record aspects of the player's ethics for the player themselves to have whatever value they may or may not have in it confirmed. What I'm talking about are things like an optional no kill objective or the Stealth Score in Dishonored and Darkmod, or the amount of loot or "number of saves", those things being listed or box-checked after finishing a level.
Actually what's interesting about those kinds of examples is their understanding of "virtue ethics" in gameworlds. No killing is an ethical mandate that's easy to understand. But having statistics tracked to confirm you ghosted a mission or ironman'd it (no reloads) or found all of the loot, those are also virtues at least in the meta-gaming sphere in the tradition of these games, and the game is confirming whether or not you really accomplished them. I guess those are more like some of the classic virtues like courage and bravery, or the virtues associated with producing great works of art. You're giving yourself a special task with a heavier burden to accomplish, and finding value in accomplishing that higher task just by the pure beauty of it. Like ghosting a Thief or Darkmod level is special because it's cleaner and there's a certain beauty to it in which you can take a special pride, even if it's still part of a crime. But even in saying that you find value in the beauty for its own sake, having the game confirm you really did it is like taking a diamond to an appraiser just to confirm it's a real diamond. The value is still in the beauty of the thing or accomplishment itself, separate from the world caring about it.
Anyway, that's a caveat to what I was saying above. The game can track certain elements relevant to virtue, and that can be good for the game; it's the worlds responding to them that I don't like.