Consider Your Ways

As I mentioned last night, I want to talk this morning about considering our actions, or more specifically, considering our ways. The last part of the caption of the photo I shared two days ago said "Think about what you are doing." This reminded me about a series of youtube videos that talked about agency in video games (among many other video game related topics). One of those videos highlighted a video game that forces the player to make tough choices - not the choices most video games have you make, like should I wield the longsword or the broadsword, should I go for the risky short cut in the racing game, or stay on the relatively safe main road, or should I play aggressively, possibly alienating other players to get an in-game edge, or should I play nice and possibly lose because I "wasn't trying hard enough"?

The game in question puts you into the role of a sci-fi hero whom a race of sentient robotic aliens believe God wants them to kill. At a certain point, you have to choose between reprogramming them into fighting for you rather than against you, or wiping them out completely. A question like this forces us to consider our core beliefs and make a moral decision. Would it be more humane to reprogram the robots rather than killing them, or would it be more Christian to destroy the robots rather than taking away their freedom to believe and act as they choose? Would either choice be immoral? Both choices sound really bad, but the targets of your actions are just machines. Sure, they're sentient; they have individuality and freedom of thought (for now), but at the same time, they're not really human. Then again neither are the many other alien races you encounter over the course of the game. If either or both decisions are evil, which one is less so? Which one would you choose?

This is the unique power of video games as a medium: They ask us to live our decisions. In this medium, we cannot be spectators. We are forced to confront our own actions, and that forces upon us a level of introspection.
- Dan, Extra Credits, Enriching Lives

 As Dan says this, there's an image of a video game box, representing the video game itself, telling the player to "LOOK AT WHAT YOU'RE DOING. NOW LOOK AT YOURSELF." The "look at what you're doing" line is what made me think about this video series following a discussion on the Sacrament and the Atonement, and I wasn't going to bring any of this up at all, except that later in the day that I blogged about that Conference talk, my Institute teacher shared Haggai 1: 2-7 in which the Lord of Hosts says, more than once "Consider Your Ways."

We are constantly making decisions. Many of them are mostly inconsequential, but each of them tells us something about ourselves. What would we choose to do if we were in that situation? If an race of alien robots was trying to kill you, and you had the power to choose either of the following options, would you reprogram the robots, or destroy them? If a friend of yours was kidnapped, and the kidnapper left a bunch of minions behind to cause trouble for you and everyone else in the countryside, would you fight through the minions to rescue your kidnapped friend, would you go out of your way to avoid harming the minions unnecessarily because they're just following orders, or would you delay your friend's rescue to crush as many minions as possible so as to protect everyone else? Super Mario Bros. doesn't seem like a game with tough moral decisions in it, but that may be because we just don't always think about the decisions we make and what those actions say about us. When I play Mario, I usually don't think twice about stomping on Goonbas on my way to save Princess Peach. Maybe I should. Maybe I should avoid harming the Goonbas when I don't have to, or maybe I should actively pursue and destroy them so as to preserve the peace of the Mushroom Kingdom. If I were actually put in that position, I'm not sure what I would do. I'd want to protect the citizens of the Mushroom Kingdom, but I'd rather not kill the Goonbas unless I had to. I'd also feel the moral responsibility to go rescue Princess Peach, but that would mean leaving the Toadstools behind to fend for themselves. The next time I play Mario, I'm going to try to think about what I'm doing.

I'm probably looking too much into this. After all, it's just a video game. But if every action we make tells us something about ourselves, then that includes every action we make in video games, and that means that it's something I, as a player of video games, should think about. What do my actions, in or out of the game, say about me? Am I making the right decisions? How do I determine what the right decisions are? Some of these questions aren't going to be easy to answer, but they're certainly questions that I should be asking myself; especially if I'm going to try to follow the Lord's counsel to "Consider [my] ways."