(Yes, you read that correctly.)
The belief that people are not free to choose what they are like or how they behave, because these things are decided by their surroundings and other things over which they have no control. (Oxford Dictionary)
Determinism noun {social sciences}
The theory that everything that happens must happen as it does and could not have happened any other way. (Cambridge Dictionary)
And for all those of you who still have no clue: it may for our sake be summed up to the simple question whether any individual is free in their will to do as they please… or not.
The Beginning
You might find yourself asking: what does a computer game have in common with a philosophical doctrine? The simple answer to that would be: depends on how closely you are willing to look.
The next, inevitable question would then be: how closely am I going to look? And the answer to that would be: just as closely as I have to. And if you’re asking yourself anything else right now, I feel inclined to tell you that you are the reader and I am the author, so you will kindly have to refrain from questioning me and just enjoy the ride.
This by no means has the ambition to be neither complete, nor scientific. It is meant but as a glimpse into the vast study of games for more than their mere value of entertainment, but self-ironically, this glimpse is supposed to be but mere entertainment to you. A pebble of humor in the sea of science, if you will. So if you’re here for the fun only, feel free to skip this next part. If you don’t want to die stupid however, you may just want to bear with me for a moment longer.
About Philosophy and Video Games
Propositional Logic
See this example:
Premise A: If you are reading this article right now, you’re pretty cool.
Premise B: You are, in fact, reading this article right now.
Conclusion: You are pretty cool indeed.
This could also be expressed as: A → B, A ⊦ B or ¬A ⋁ B
While this seems fairly simple now, it could also look something like this:
{P ⋁ Q, ¬Q ⋀ R, (P ⋁ Q) → R}
Now, I’m not here to explain to you exactly how this works, and neither are you here to learn about computer science, so let’s agree on the fact that this way of expressing premises and results exists, and that one can connect assumptions through odd looking symbols. That’s really all you need to know for now. It is an important part to understanding coding, and thus to understanding how the overall functionalities of a video game are expressed in a language.
And now comes the fun part about this whole explanation: philosophy works with the very same way of expressing cause and effect relationships, which are rather common when talking about doctrines such as free will. It’s a form of ‘formal logic’, that is common and used in almost the exact same way as in mathematics, and thus in computer science. Let’s try this for free will (just because I can):
For any event e, there will be some antecedent state of nature N, and a law of nature L, such that given L, N will be followed by e. This could also be expressed as L = N → e.
See, we basically expressed determinism (through natural law in this case) in propositional logic! Congrats if you’re still with me, I’m well aware that this isn’t too easy to understand.
Now that there’s a basic connection, we may continue to delve into just this connection (without math, thank the gods).
God, Nature or Programming?
Once we introduce another philosopher to our little programming problem, namely Kant (pretty cool guy, in terms of his theories), we face another problem. For Kant, acting consciously and out of choice according to moral laws (which we will leave undefined here and just roll with society’s conventions) means the freedom of action, and thus free will. The problem we face with the Sims however is that (unlike games like GTA, which is a whole different problem) it doesn’t allow the player to even choose to make truly immoral decisions. There’s no option to murder someone when they get annoying, or to commit suicide when life itself gets annoying. The decision is taken from the player, which would likely lead Kant to say that the Sims player is not free in their will. As this is a flaw, again, of the game’s structure (its ‘natural law’), Spinoza would probably agree with Kant.
And now the god comes in. A puny god, admittedly, as we will see soon. Determinism through any kind of deity is a rather common belief, and while we could be led to the assumption that the ‘god’ equals the law of nature, and thus the coding (or is it the programmer?), it is not what the game wants you to think.
The entire concept of the Sims, a literal life simulation game, is based on enabling the player to act as (a) god. It’s not only conveyed by the intention of the game being to literally make people do stuff and thus taking their free will from them, but also by the visual perspective. When you look at the game, you look down. Boom, you're in an instant position of power. So telling people what to do, shaping the world to one’s own wishes and having the (seemingly) utter control about the ongoings in the world does make the players feel like they are the one in power, like they are the god of this virtual reality.
That’s actually quite funny, does one consider what was previously stated. The player is given the illusion of free will, while really, they are determined by the game’s programming and the moral values of the programmers (or their bosses), which also went into the code, prohibiting certain actions and forcing others.
Let’s illustrate this with an example: (this is where the puppies come in)
Imagine a puppy in a playpen. Said puppy has a lot of space, some toys, and the freedom to act within the given reality and with the given items as he pleases. Now, this freedom to act within a given reality will keep the puppy content and happy, and distract him from the fences of the pen. He will believe (yes, let’s assume that puppies do think logically) that he is free in his will, as he is not hindered to interact, and act, as he pleases. He won’t develop a wish to leave the pen if he does not know that the possibility to leave exists, or that he is, in fact, caught in a pen in the first place. The pen is his world, and he doesn’t see the fence as a fence. Neither does he realize that while he is free to play with his toys as he pleases, the toys he gets to play with in the first place were picked by his human. So the puppy will still believe he is free in will, while the human is setting up the reality within which the puppy is free indeed. Did this make things clearer? No? The puppy is obviously the player, and the pen is the world of the Sims. The human is the code, or the programmer. Yet, we could go on to ask if the human (either in the puppy example or the programmer, both is fine) isn’t also stuck within a playpen he is unable to see the fences of.
And right at this point, we’re back to the original debate about determinism. The circle is complete, if you will.
So, to sum it up, we could agree that while the players themselves are determined by the technical making-up of the game (as are the Sims, but we would need to look into the code to say more about that), they are able to function as the determining factor within the given possibilities of the game.
What's this even good for?
Since we as players are at least able to control some of the game (or refuse to do so), we shall look into that a little bit closer! Here comes the fun part (if you didn’t already consider the theory fun, which I certainly did) where we test what happens if we refuse to act upon the power the game is giving us. (Because, technically, the refusal to act upon the power given to us is part of free will too.)
