You’re walking along the crowded city streets of ancient Jerusalem or Liberty City, the specifics aren’t important. You’ve been exploring these same streets for years, in a different context every time, but the faces never change. All of a sudden, boredom overcomes you and you wonder what would happen if you trick that generic looking citizen into walking into your cleverly placed rat trap. You’ve set up a Rube Goldberg machine of landmines, falling debris, and perhaps, if you’re feeling very devious, chainsaws. The naïve fool is left in a bloody, poorly rendered mess, and in all likelihood, you return to the “normal game” that the developers intended.

These little diversions are fun, but there is always a tinge of guilt, or excitement, the first time that you perform a nasty little experiment. It is the taboo, unnatural element that makes breaking the rules so entertaining. Sure, Rockstar knows that gamers are going to go on a rampage to see how much destruction they can cause, but it is because the game seems to punish this activity that it seems so exciting. If “Press the X button to cap a pedestrian in the face” was in the tutorial, the pastime would offer little more than a few shallow chuckles.

Many ancient games did not allow for exploration in the same freeform fashion that the open-world era offers, but even developers then acknowledged and rewarded illicit behavior. Do you remember the first time you chose to pummel the chickens in A Link to the Past? Nintendo knew that gamers were naturally curious, and decided to grace us with perhaps the most entertaining punishment ever.



But it is that unexplored, virgin territory that makes interactive experimentation so thrilling. A rational person would never devote time to thinking of how many people they could run over before their car inexplicably set on fire, or how many town guards they could fend off before being overrun, but in the context of a game, these are reasonable questions with interesting answers.

Yet, in gaming, the concept of evil is totally lost on the curious. Surely a person can’t be judged for running over a guy in a game. A real body would not have flown 30 feet in the air and glitched into a stray polygon! It is this separation of the real and the unreal that is integral to the healthy development of any gamer.



The illusion of evil in games has little to do with the actual content of the games, and more on the media circus surrounding the games themselves. During the infamous Columbine shootings, the police discovered that one of the shooters had used the Doom Map Editor to plot out his school, complete with unarmed enemy models and ran through the course daily to memorize the layout of the school. The obsessive, twisted nature of that one individual has haunted the medium of gaming ever since.

Developers have begun to combat this by removing the possibility for many of the more politically incorrect scenarios. Most modern games do not feature children or elderly that can be harmed. Nudity and true gore are not available to prevent rape and torture scenarios. The use of zombies and terrorists as generic enemies offer a disassociation from the reality that you, as a player, are simulating murder. You are the hero, justified in all that you do, because most games cannot be bothered to be bogged down by actual moral quandaries. Moral choices in most games include the evil option simply out of curiosity.

No, true evil in games comes in the curiosity of every day people exploring questions and scenarios that they don’t typically think about on a day-to-day basis. A good book or movie or even linear game narrative can prod you to think about subjects that are typically deemed to be evil, but only the medium of interactivity can allow you to create a barrier whereby you commit the evil yourself, of your own free will.

Modern Warfare 2 or Edmund can force you to do evil things, but the justification on the part of the player is that you are following a scripted story by the developer. When you kill a child in Fallout 1 and 2, it was just because you could. When you put your Sim into a pool and take out the ladders, it was to watch them die like an ant below a magnifying glass. When you are left to guard the hostages in Counter-Strike and you kill them all, losing the whole team money, you are doing so out of morbid curiosity