Recently after reading the short mini-debate on morality in video games, karma meters and so on. I figured I would post a long stream of logic that ultimately creates the question of "how many 'Heroes'/'Villains' in video games are really what they are claimed to be.
The argument goes like this.
You have a dictator, an evil ruler of a country stereotypically called "the empire". He's literally dating the daughter of the devil, and would set off any detect evil spell in a 120 foot radius of him.
....but the hero has nothing on him.
This villain is the ultimate pragmatist, he realizes that if you enslave people and abuse them, they'll betray you. Some teenager with attitude and a 5-foot sword will kick down your door and murder you (and never get charged for it I might add). He is nice to his people, doesn't amass material wealth that he doesn't need, and overall if you kicked him out of the power, his people would just raise him from the dead and put him back in power.
But he's not nice because, it's the right thing to do, or anything like that. He's nice because he realizes it gives him better long term profit, and he basically gets to spit in any "heroes" face that come to overthrow him, calling them nothing more than petty assassins.
Is he still evil/a villain?
Ultimately even a psychologist that I debated this to said he would therefore be a good person. That basically creates the question for me.
Is it your action or your motivation that makes you 'moral'. The classic RPG hero who kills mooks to stop the empire. He's a hero right? What if you had a rpg protagonist who stops the empire, not because it's the right thing to do, but rather because he's a psychopath who realizes that so long as he stops the empire no one is going to care that he brutally murdered thousands of people on the way there.
Is he still the hero? Let's face it there are a LOT of silent protagonists out there who we never see the internal mental working of.
This is what I like to call the Hero's paradox. If you base things on action, the hero is now a murderer, and the villain is now a heroic leader. If you base thing on motivation, the leader that everyone loves is now a brutal villain, and the hero gets a "get out of jail free" card. Not to mention it negates a lot of heroes status AS heroes. Let's face it, how many video games have you played, where you could sum up your reason for doing the missions as "because person x told me so".
Ultimately the solution is obviously not to base morality systems on black and white morality, but those are brutally tricky to make, and often have problems of their own. Once you start analyzing a lot of actions, and realize that a lot of "good" solutions don't even need a good heart to do them, you just need a person who's smart enough to realize "you know, maybe leveling this forest for a minor amount of iron isn't that smart, instead of endlessly harvesting lumber and trading it to the other countries, and any attempt to add second or third axis, ultimately will enter similar problems.
So what do you people think? Can you think of examples from gaming or fiction in general, where the hero sometimes just seemed like a hero in name only? Where the "paragon of light" was more "psychopath with good PR"? How about the opposite?
The argument goes like this.
You have a dictator, an evil ruler of a country stereotypically called "the empire". He's literally dating the daughter of the devil, and would set off any detect evil spell in a 120 foot radius of him.
....but the hero has nothing on him.
This villain is the ultimate pragmatist, he realizes that if you enslave people and abuse them, they'll betray you. Some teenager with attitude and a 5-foot sword will kick down your door and murder you (and never get charged for it I might add). He is nice to his people, doesn't amass material wealth that he doesn't need, and overall if you kicked him out of the power, his people would just raise him from the dead and put him back in power.
But he's not nice because, it's the right thing to do, or anything like that. He's nice because he realizes it gives him better long term profit, and he basically gets to spit in any "heroes" face that come to overthrow him, calling them nothing more than petty assassins.
Is he still evil/a villain?
Ultimately even a psychologist that I debated this to said he would therefore be a good person. That basically creates the question for me.
Is it your action or your motivation that makes you 'moral'. The classic RPG hero who kills mooks to stop the empire. He's a hero right? What if you had a rpg protagonist who stops the empire, not because it's the right thing to do, but rather because he's a psychopath who realizes that so long as he stops the empire no one is going to care that he brutally murdered thousands of people on the way there.
Is he still the hero? Let's face it there are a LOT of silent protagonists out there who we never see the internal mental working of.
This is what I like to call the Hero's paradox. If you base things on action, the hero is now a murderer, and the villain is now a heroic leader. If you base thing on motivation, the leader that everyone loves is now a brutal villain, and the hero gets a "get out of jail free" card. Not to mention it negates a lot of heroes status AS heroes. Let's face it, how many video games have you played, where you could sum up your reason for doing the missions as "because person x told me so".
Ultimately the solution is obviously not to base morality systems on black and white morality, but those are brutally tricky to make, and often have problems of their own. Once you start analyzing a lot of actions, and realize that a lot of "good" solutions don't even need a good heart to do them, you just need a person who's smart enough to realize "you know, maybe leveling this forest for a minor amount of iron isn't that smart, instead of endlessly harvesting lumber and trading it to the other countries, and any attempt to add second or third axis, ultimately will enter similar problems.
So what do you people think? Can you think of examples from gaming or fiction in general, where the hero sometimes just seemed like a hero in name only? Where the "paragon of light" was more "psychopath with good PR"? How about the opposite?
