The Last Thing We Need is Morally Black-and-White Video Game Heroes
By: Reese Weatherly
Tags: Morality, Oppression, Video Games, Writing, Storytelling

The Last Thing We Need is Morally Black-and-White Video Game Heroes

No, nuance isn’t a sign of privilege and moral certainty isn’t a hallmark of the artwork of the oppressed

Press x to have a moral conundrum. Art by Hadley Weatherly

Empathy is the difference between games and other formats we use to tell stories.

In most stories, you extend your empathy in order to give yourself the perspective of a character; but a game does not just give you relatable details to encourage you to empathize with a character’s frustrations. A game gives you their goals and frustrations directly and immediately. If a character falls down in a movie, you think “she fell down.” But if your player character in a video game falls in a hole, even if it has nothing to do with anything you did, you think “I fell down!” You might even get a sinking and unstable feeling, even if that character is very different from who you are, even if you don’t like that character, you’re taking their perspective, or you aren’t really playing.

You compete with yourself in the game of acting like this character, and by strategizing to best do what they do, you understand them. You feel frustration directly as the person or the city or whatever entity you are playing as in that moment. Thus, giving a player bad motivations is something uniquely effective in games, because you cannot distance yourself from a person you are playing the way you can for a person you are watching or reading about. Being someone who should know better or who is being manipulated into doing a bad thing and then frantically doing it anyway is something that can only happen in a game, and that tension becomes the experience of playing it.

Perhaps this is why video games have been particularly original in creating morally unpalatable characters and stories, because it’s something you can explore in video games in a way you can’t in other media. Much has been written about Papers Please or that one game where you make a fake news twitter account or do censorship at a newspaper. These games show you how certain aims lead a person to being complicit in bad things, and while they show you being manipulated into doing bad things. Most of us would like to think of ourselves as morally uncompromising when it’s important, and these games reveal to us the ways in which the cost of that is sometimes too high. Far from moral flexibility being a marker of privilege, being in a situation where you must compromise your morals or walk away from your needs is also the experience of the occupied nation and the underclass.

The act of playing a game is engaging in tradeoffs, and that makes tragedy a natural choice for a game with a story. A classical tragedy is a story of a character who wants two mutually exclusive things, for example, personal power and influence for themselves and justice and freedom for others, who tries to get both at the same time but instead ruins one or both entirely. That double failure scenario is also what happens to me most times I play any video game. A game that makes you do bad things is not in itself empowering toward a specific social change, but working for social change is not made out of empowerment alone. Understanding how personality clashes and human fallibility has derailed social change in history is not necessarily an anti-progressive thought to think about.

Whether a villain is ambiguous or is exactly as villainous as you thought all along is probably more a function of how much real estate is available than it is a moral indicator about the writers or the fans. A lot of video games are ten or forty hour explorations of concepts we’ve already liked in ninety minute movies, and that can be a long time for all the good guys to continue being good and all the bad guys to only get worse through each twisting chapter. For many reasons, the moral quandary style of games are a popular experience, and, like any popular format, a lot of them are bad, and have to make some silly reaches to make the conundrums and twists they present even sort of make sense, but that doesn’t mean those stories would have been satisfying if they had left their protagonist’s righteousness intact.

The problem with moral purity isn’t whether it should be presented or not, but who is allowed to be depicted as morally upright, and to what audience. The 50 cent produced show For Life is based on a true story of a wrongly convicted man, who practiced law while incarcerated. The character has a different name than his real life inspiration, perhaps because his pursuit of justice might cross some lines a lawyer wouldn’t cross, I guess for dramatic reasons. However, what’s really refreshing about the show is not just that our main character does the right thing, but that the district attorneys are such absolute villains straight from central casting. Their motivations are explored without them ever being seen as anything but a wrongheaded obstacle, and their steadfastness in never admitting problems with themselves or the justice system is what makes them villains, while that stubborn “I must be right because the system fails if you don’t trust my judgement” morality would make them seem righteous, on a different show.

But the moral clarity of For Life is interesting and refreshing specifically because of the particulars, not because unambiguously bad villains are themselves a brave thing to write, in any story. It is interesting specifically because we have spent so much time either ignoring the problem or relating to the prosecutor and not the wrongfully convicted. Specifically it is something new to have such villainous district attorneys menacing an incarcerated man on television, to the same audiences that have been inured to hating prisoners and also hating defense attorneys and taking the side of prosecutors.

The thing is, the audience for video games skews toward privilege. Games are economically and sometimes physically inaccessible to many people, they are often tied up in nostalgia for racist works of fiction and reflect perspectives that are western, industrialized, educated, rich and democratically governed at least in name. Because of this, the characters also tend to be privileged or the stories centered on things that the most privileged in society care about. Some of the most successful games are indeed morally pure and simplistic, and I’m not sure how another would help.

Will Master Chief shooting at the unappealing and clearly bad genocide monsters carry a deep message to this audience? I’m not sure, and I’m very unsure of whether that message would be clearer for the audience if his own actions were always just, if he had never been wrong about anything, if the villains learned nothing and could not be reasoned with or changed. This is an audience that is already prepared for simple narratives and justified heroes who use sharpshooting to make their sad go away. Playing a game is inherently empowering, in it, you press buttons or flail your controller around and make things happen, so making the player regret or question their actions is a natural way to add contrast to the story.

There’s an argument that stories don’t have to make their audience doubt their righteousness or their justifications for violence, that there should be stories where violence was not a mistake. I would not make that argument about video games, broadly. It’s probably not brave to target such a story to gamers as an audience.

I read an article that was pretty good in specific criticisms of franchises that went morally gray and gritty without having too much to say, but then the article claimed that nuanced stories are dismissive of how evil the real evils of the world are and that games should be more morally simplistic:

If moral uncertainty is a perspective steeped in privilege, then victims of religious or familial abuse must be the most privileged people in the world. Ongoing complex abuse creates the exact feelings that this quotation views as privileged: the sense that the abuser is a good and necessary source of love in your life, a detailed and nuanced perspective on the facets and motivations of the familial or cultural beliefs that underpin and justify the abuse, and the feeling, as the victim, that I am capable of the same behavior that I have learned and experienced.

This association is not unique to the article, but it is bafflingly common in progressive spaces, even though this righteous rejection of ambiguity is mostly directed at people who don’t fit in, individuals who carry the moral teachings of a culture who rejected them, who do not have the moral clarity of someone who is loved and accepted consistently by a family or community who share the same world view.

When I hear this assertion it’s often made as though it is self evident or obvious that moral ambiguity is something the author creates for an improper purpose, promoted by fans with similar bad intent.

Viewing all characters as fully human is not a trait of privilege, and there’s nothing in the essay to explain on what basis that is suggested. I do understand why it can feel frustrating when a critical lens is misapplied to political movements that people fear unfairly. However, that does not mean that stories of misplaced trust, stories of heroes who let us down, are all defending racism and institutional harm. It does not mean that morally simplistic stories are more anti-fascist than stories where the fascism is understood to have relatable motivations.

Birth of a Nation, the original, silent movie, was a morally as well as racially black-and-white story: White, and the Klan, were presented in the narrative as completely good, and Black as completely bad. It was also hugely influential to American filmmaking and storytelling.

There were also stories at the time that were not so morally simplistic, that presented Black or mixed people as tragic or morally gray, but the creators of these tragedy themed stories were not more privileged or more racist than those making the morally black-and-white stories. In the case of stories white people told about slavery, the complexity of the moral narrative has no correlation to how racist or anti-racist the reception to the work had been.

Indeed, the idea of an inherently good hero/leader arriving and using military power and persuasive charisma to make everything morally shiny and right is appealing to lots of brands of fascism and racism. Oppressive and genocidal entities largely have been responsible for producing these feel-good adventure stories, and the morally simplistic stories of our childhoods are mostly direct descendants of those:

Much of the morally black-and-white media we consume is the legitimized heir of racist fiction affirming manifest destiny or the righteousness of nobility and the ruling class. Characterizing Game of Thrones as a total mess is fair in the context of just judging Game of Thrones itself, but in the context of broader fiction about feudal lords and kings, it’s hard to argue that it’s more racist than the works that it satirizes. George R.R. Martin wrote A Song of Ice and Fire as a reaction to the Tolkien type of fantasy, stories where you knew immediately who was a good person based on skin tone, where being corrupted made characters physically ugly, and where a powerful lineage was often the same as moral correctness.

You are meant to think about race in a more critical way in George R.R. Martin’s work, and that can make it easier to call it racist or bad. Tolkien does not invite you to analyze the inhumanity of its “least lovely mongol types” in the unambiguously evil orcs. Tolkien is hopeful and makes you feel good, so, on a purely comfort based level, it’s easy to feel like Tolkien is inclusive and Martin is abrasive and hurtful. But when you take one in context of the other, the decision to rewrite Tolkien’s covert racism as an overt world element makes sense, and the assertion that moral simplicity is better for people of color no longer makes much sense at all.

I have endless compassion for anyone who chose to forget or to not watch the final season of Game of Thrones so you’ll have to forgive me for bringing it up (if your world view allows for that kind of thing,) but it seems like a controversial example of the morally black-and-white storytelling being better than grey, because the show changed from grey to black-and-white, and everyone agreed that was trash.

When everything was ambiguous and just intermittently awful, like a raisin pudding of abuse and manipulation, the show was received pretty well and at least gave the actors something interesting to do. When they switched to making a character who made both good and bad decisions into an absolute bad guy, the show stopped being interesting.

The black-and-white, clear hero and villain culmination of the show is also where the racial insinuations were used to mark a villain as bad, they made a speech in a guttural foreign language a signifier of instability and evil. While the grey show presented liberating slaves as a bloody coup with morally grey details, the black-and-white final season had the show’s conscience character mock the audience for not recognizing how bad freeing slaves had been. When our most intelligent and nuanced character confirmed that all the morally grey stuff we saw before was actually just bad, that’s when the critics and most of the fans abandoned any defense of the writers.

This particular example is not one of a show putting people off by being morally grey except for the lucky few who stopped watching before season six. Instead, it seems to me that it’s a very strong example of people being bored and let down by black-and-white narratives with overly self sacrificing characters getting to be the heroes and anyone who wanted something passionately being characterized as completely unsympathetic and bad.

Bioshock is also based on a morally black-and-white universe and philosophy, the Objectivist thinking of Ayn Rand. Being frustrated with the twists and turns of this story is valid, but asserting that a more black-and-white moral narrative would be more anti-racist is very strange in relation to this franchise in specific. Ayn Rand unambiguously believed that self interest and capitalism were right and that any sacrifice or concession for the good of society or marginalized people was evil. The cities in these games, being run on the crushed dreams of dehumanized orphans, were Ayn Rand’s utopian ideal. Asserting that black-and-white thinking is the arena of the oppressed and that morally gray analyses are privileged or white, in the context of the interpretation of the works of Ayn Rand of all people, is so strange I struggle to decide what this assertion even implies.

Star Trek was pitched to Desilu as “A wagon train in Space.” It’s core inspiration is the western: simple morality tales with an unexamined backdrop of Manifest Destiny and expansion on stolen land, and it’s important to note that white supremacy was not an edgy addition to make westerns morally grey, they often presented white people claiming stolen land as unambiguously good, and most people of color as bad, without much exploration. Star Trek took from this template its atmosphere of adventure, hope and possibility, but it also carried on racialized fears of the other and often presented contact with other cultures as an opportunity to fix their backward ways.

As American society grew out of the optimism of the expansion era western, so too did Star Trek venture away from that type of story, and its morally pure, semi-militaristic Federation became something more complex and grey, something that included stories of semi-justified terrorists and societal institutions hijacked by controlling bigots. Lots of people have decried the loss of the original positive message of the 1960’s show, that multiculturalism and anti-sexism was better served in that version, but I would ask those people to go back and watch it. Watch original Star Trek and then come up with specific examples of the morality it expressed, and how it was less sympathetic to fascism compared to later messy ugly Star Trek shows with variously flawed characters.

Even somewhat ham-fisted pro-diversity shows like the original Star Trek are held up as ideal entertainment by people who are angry about current sci-fi having women and racial minorities as main characters; why is that? Although the message was pro-diversity and sometimes anti-authoritarian, Star Trek was a show that for a long time had an educated white man who told you what to think of an episode when it ended. Arguably, it was not the stated message that stuck with these fans, but the way that the stated message was delivered. I like the franchise, but I also think that the primacy of the captain’s morality made it, at best, a children’s show, and at worst, a message that strangers from strange cultures bowing to your perspective is the sum total of what morality is. The choice that the digital kidnapping Black Mirror episode Callister was a Star Trek style role play perhaps was not merely done for aesthetics, but as a critique of the show and its fans, specifically in their appreciation of women and other cultures as objects, but fear of them having lives of their own.

There’s some history of the assertion that certain broad types of critical thought are inherently privileged and white, while other, more simplistic or emotional categories of thought are more spiritual or non-white, and I suspect that you know, I really disagree. It appeals to highly westernized cultures to see the world in binary terms with analysis being either privileged and western and the lack of analysis as wise and eastern. The thing is, our concept of whiteness is centered on just a few cultures in Europe, which is just a tiny seaside corner of Asia. More philosophies are exotic to Europe than are endemic, mathematics, empiricism, the person as a blank slate or as a function of their social station and relationships, these are all philosophies developed across different cultures and places. Thinking of half of all human philosophy perspective as privileged and hegemonic and the other half as wise and oppressed is a very WEIRD take: Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic in origin.

A key 90s example of this was Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, or, at least, the stated morality of the protagonist in the text. In The Mists of Avalon, the narrator Morgaine asserts, on the first page, that analytical thinking is not valid, that it’s a western anti-pagan invention, that nuance is wrong, and instead that affirming your own world view makes it real and valid. As a villain repurposed as an unambiguous hero, she does terrible things all the time, but the narrative holds her up as correct and those things as necessary, and taking her side is framed by Marion Zimmer Bradley as a very smart anti-oppression way of thinking.

My issue with this is that oppression is not a mood, and a white person writing a protagonist as good and justified no matter their actions is not sending a message of solidarity to the oppressed, even if she uses the language of oppression to shore up the victim narrative of a powerful and privileged character. Marion Zimmer Bradley relating her character’s choices to marginalization and Christian hegemony does not mean that her writing expressed a valid or good perspective of a cultural minority, when her own paganism was something she could “get over” in her words, leaving her a member of the cultural majority when it served her to do so. Her ability to find her protagonist to be relatable and justified was at the time held up as a refreshing feminist perspective or perhaps a morally grey story, although you could make it through the books just fine without ever holding Morgaine accountable for the tragedy of the story.

The co-opting of oppression to insist upon an inflexible morality is Marion Zimmer Bradley’s version of “You ain’t Black.” Like some Vice Presidents I won’t name, she equates a personal marginalized identity with moral clarity, that a truly oppressed person would not have any moral puzzles and would unquestioningly side with anyone even superficially aligned with diversity, and sure, maybe sometimes that happens. Even so, while it’s sometimes frustrating to understand, people can be oppressed for real and still not have moral clarity or a sure sense of what is the good or bad thing to support. Our experience with oppression might inform our opinions, but no opinions belong to privilege or oppression entirely.

Whether the author knew it or not, The Mists of Avalon is a great example of a powerful character creating a black-and-white victim narrative that permits any and all destructive actions against nearly every other named character. “I feel wronged, and so, I’m right” may sometimes be an attitude that the genuinely oppressed feel, but it’s also an attitude held by people with very easy lives, with privileges that are baked into the societies where they exist, and have been, for generations. Some people write black-and-white narratives because any grey contrast would reveal that the narrative they are pushing is wholly self serving, and if the audience were invited to question if the protagonist was really justified for even one second, the whole narrative would unravel and the character would be seen as selfish and pointlessly evil.

I would argue that in some ways we are not in an era of having morally flawed characters as much as we are in an era of pointing out those flaws and dwelling on them a little bit. The various awful acts that Morgaine justifies would be great fodder for an HBO-worthy moral fog, but they really weren’t taken that way by the writer or the audience at the time. Much of the simplistic morality of the 90’s justified actions that seem like downfall instigating tragic turns, now, but were accepted uncritically at the time as simply clever or resourceful actions for a cool protagonist.

Now, we dwell on anti-heroes manipulating and poisoning their enemies and their allies as edgy moral complexity, but from 1950–1998, you could see the hero of a romantic comedy do any of those things and remain completely good in the narrative, and if anyone complained, those people just didn’t understand the context and motivation for those actions. Sometimes, this is the context for the compulsion for stories to dwell on people driven to do bad things, not a desire to corrupt for corruption’s own sake, but to show corruption as bad as a correction to popular self serving narratives that framed protagonists as blameless for hurting people just based on feeling justified.

The creators of Star Wars were not taking on a narrative of the oppressed when making the simple adventure in Episode 6 and did not with time become more privileged when they started framing the bad guy as sympathetic in episode 7. Some moral ambiguity can amplify the clear cut morality of a protagonist. While the first Star Wars is entirely morally simple, Darth Vader’s reveal and change of heart sort of qualifies as a moral gray area, but the complexity of the villain is what enables the hero to be truly unambiguously good, the complexity of their personal history allows him to be kind and not kill his father, even in a story where other good guys kill lots of bad guys. By including villains with good in them and good guys whose actions fall on a spectrum, the story can have a purely good character and have that, by contrast, mean something to the audience.

I hear the ghost of Steven Universe Critical Tumblr hissing from the darkness, saying that nonviolence in the face of fascist domination is wrong, and that the purism that violence begets violence is incorrect, that the fight against fascism and racism ought to be violent and uncritically correct, and sure, you can think of that as correct in the context of whatever fight you’re justifying. But with Luke Skywalker, (and Steven Universe,) we are talking specifically about the beneficiaries of privilege taking on their own problematic history — the narrative doesn’t ask for Darth Vader’s victims to forgive him and change him, we specifically have his son, who gets a laser sword and a great adventure specifically because of being his son, to take their history into account and to risk himself in order to change their family story. The beneficiaries of privilege cannot defeat it by equating privilege with irreversible corruption, by pretending that their own privilege does not exist and their own power is inherently justified however they wield it.

There are two sides to the explosion of content options audiences have had recently. We have had a greater diversity of perspectives, but there also has been an increase of the importance of sharing online, often to increasingly narrow groups of people with narrower streams of information. The critics of each little corner of the internet then are free to take any new perspectives personally in a negative way, claiming to be supporting diversity by insisting on one very narrow pre-approved form of expression or type of story. Some people maintain a social media following primarily by discounting stories that leave anything to the audience to figure out. But especially now that we spend our days having our own views preached back to us on social media, we don’t just accept that re-heated old view of good and evil over and over in the stories we consume.

People may want to be righteous and unambiguously moral when they’re defending movies and games, but they want something new and challenging in the actual experience. True stories, or fiction that brings us to new understandings about the real world, don’t have easy morals and don’t contain people who are easily and consistently understood as good or bad. Whether it’s in the ambiguity of the moral universe or an unusual never before tried choice in who gets to be the conscience and moral core of the story, the grey isn’t going away.