morality

Over the weekend, I was in my hometown with my brother which has put me in my high school mentality. I spent the weekend playing games with my brother on his X-Box 360 on our ridiculously huge HDTV.

I played "Mirror's Edge" for the first time, and found it to be a very fun game despite various criticisms. Although that being said, it is a very challenging game. If you don't like games that have a great deal of trial and error, then you might not like the game. I like to think of myself as a gamer who is not as frustrated with impossibly hard games. The game has a great visual feel and the controls feel very natural once you get used to it. I really like the use of color in the game the layout of various levels.

For those unfamiliar with the game, "Mirror's Edge" is about an underground courier service which has become the last remaining unmonitored form of communication in a Orwellian future police state. You play the character Faith who has to run, jump and climb like Jackie Chan to get from point to point to complete various missions. The game also allows you to steal people's guns and turn around and shoot them, however, with a gun in your hand you run slower, and inhibits your ability to climb. In an entire jungle of games in which the only strategy are different means of killing people, "Mirror's Edge" offers a refreshing solution which doesn't envolve killing.

This is where I find there is a great example of moral choice. Shooting people is not required to complete the game, nor are you blatantly rewarded for being a goody-two-shoes other than getting an out of story based achievement award. This is quite different from the other morality driven decisions in games in which there are active consequences in your actions. For me, this attempt to consider moral choices merely operates on the preconventional level of Kohlberg's moral stages. A gamer will do a morally upright action within the game for the purpose of some direct reward. There is no moral education, and people tend to do different actions just to see what would happen. However, in games like "Metal Gear Solid", or "Mirror's Edge" the gamer must chose whether or not to kill someone. They don't have to, and they won't be rewarded directly for not doing so. In fact the game doesn't seem to care either way, the choice is ultimately on you. This for me reaches a Postconvential level of moral reasoning because it is only up to the judgement of how the player feels is morally correct. In the end Postconventional moral reasoning for me relies on the idea of what one does when there is no one there to judge you.