When I was in high school, I read Robert Frost’s Out, Out—, and it really fucked me up. I remember going home and, in tears, demanding to know why anyone would create a story so horrible and so unjust, and swearing that all stories should be kind and gentle and good and leave us feeling joy and not sorrow.
Also, I was a high school student.
This week, Khee Hoon Chan wrote an article for Polygon— “Games need to return to black-and-white morality.” She argues against prestige video game’s embrace of gray morality in favor of a return to “black-and-white games centered around the concept of absolute, objective morality.” It’s not only a better narrative choice—”Watching our heroes stick to their convictions, even against insurmountable odds, ratchets up drama, rather than destroying it”—it also provides the sort of moral clarity and focus we need during the social, economic, and institutional crisis we are currently living through. In fact, we very well may have a moral imperative to embrace clear frameworks of right-and-wrong within our stories: “The concept of black-and-white morality doesn’t just remain within the fictional realm. It has the capacity to influence how we frame and perceive real-life events. Unlike fiction, allowing a sense of moral dilemma over both sides, particularly in the current era of burgeoning social change, reinforces the kinds of false equivalencies that might slow down social change.”
I actually… agree with large parts of Chan’s argument. Like Gretchen Felker-Martin summarizes in her own essay on Chan’s piece, I think that “AAA video games are awash in fake-deep moral quandaries and uninteresting depictions of shitty people doing shitty things.” This is doubly true of the exhausting tendency of games trying to “make you think” by forcing the player into the most simplistic and puerile moral choices imaginable. And I’m tired of the “we’re not so different, you and I” type of moral quandary that seems so in vogue.
Also—showing my own cards here—I know that most of the time, my art actually meet Chan’s requirements of a stark black-and-white morality. I’ll be the first to admit that I write simplistic stories where heroes are upright and overcome their foes, where characters are eloquent and emotionally honest, and where the real foes are blinkered institutions.
But I’m also an erotica author that writes all sorts of morally questionable content. And I’m a little perturbed by the argument that there’s a clearly correct, morally transcendent way to Do Art During This Crisis.
On some important and fundamental level, Chan’s argument is the same as Plato’s in The Republic—art has an important and indispensable role in moral education and cultivation, and true art will embody only the most morally uplifting stories. That’s even how Chan’s essay ends: “The concept that good can ultimately triumph over evil is a timeless one, and stories that rally around this trope—around unadulterated hope—can help guide us through the year’s ceaseless onslaught of calamities.”
I understand the impetus of her argument. I understand that motivating desire to help. The radio ads keep framing events as “in these trying times,” and reminding us that we’re all asked to “pull together.” How else should the artist chip in and pull with the crowd, except to write stories that are kind and gentle and good and leave us feeling joy and not sorrow?
You know, a little bit of sugar for these trying times. A little bit of feel-good, unchallenging, unproblematic wish fulfillment for the duration of the emergency. “People NEED stories of hope right now.” As they have always needed them. As they will always need them. And don’t you want to provide that? Don’t you realize that providing the opposite of that is, in fact… not good? Actually bad? Actually immoral?
Well, you’re certainly entitled to write it. This is a free country. But don’t expect me to like it. Don’t expect anyone to like it. And you can write it, but maybe it’s best for the moral cultivation of the Republic that you be #cancelled.
Gretchen Felker-Martin’s aforelinked essay—”Fuck Moral Art“—is succinct and expresses many of my thoughts on this topic; in fact, this post was originally written as a comment replying to it. But I want to add one thing, a specific analysis:
Chan touches on the original The Last of Us only briefly—which is probably for the best, because I think it supports her argument in only the most ambivalent sense. She cites it as proof that in modern video games, our heroic protagonists almost always win, regardless of the moral underpinnings of their behavior. In her argument, the “twist” of the game’s ending—when Joel, having initially accepted that the cure for the plague that has destroyed humanity necessitates the death of his adopted daughter Ellie, rejects that sacrifice and bloodily fights his way through a medical complex to save her—is the contrast between how a hero should act, and how Joel behaves. To save her, he kills the militia guarding the procedure, as well as the irreplaceable and knowledgeable medical staff that might be able to cure the plague. He also does this against Ellie’s clear wishes. This is unheroic, unsympathetic, excessive: “The tension of the game’s brutal final act comes from the contrast between how we have been led to perceive him, and his actions in the most important scene in the game.”
And yet… that is not the moral lesson I learned from this story.
Time and again, we are told in stories—other stories, with other moral frameworks and ideas of what is just and true and good—that true morality is the preservation of even the smallest life; that “the greater good” is not an acceptable excuse; that a world built on the death and sacrifice of even one innocent is intolerable. This is the moral argument of Ivan’s conversation with Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov; this is the moral argument of Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”
And here we have a video game that carries that argument to its logical conclusion, that sees a man who has lost a daughter violently oppose the idea that it is just and moral to sacrifice another daughter on the altar of “the greater good.” Are his actions also selfish? Yes. But are his actions a shock, a surprise, a contrast to how he behaved previously? Not in the slightest.
The “twist” of the game’s ending isn’t that Joel suddenly surprises the player with immoral and unheroic behavior; it’s that, to the shock and horror of the player, he continues to act with the same morality that characterized him at the start of the story, and which he has spent the course of the narrative regaining and cherishing. His actions are entirely internally consistent, and it is a credit to the story’s writing that the player forgets this, only to be blindsided by the brutality Joel is willing to unleash to avoid repeating history.
The twist is that Joel embodies the most uncompromising, black-and-white morality one can.
But his actions do not restore the Republic; they are not morally uplifting, and are thus immoral. They are violent and terrible, and if everyone behaved as he did, we would have no greater good to sacrifice for. His selfishness has damned the world. So we must shake our heads and say “the barbarity! If only he were a hero through-and-through, and so let that child die!”
At the end of the day, I want my stories—both the stories I consume and the stories I create—to argue for something, to have a moral backbone, to do more than to bow their heads and say “theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron.” In that regard, I think Khee Hoon Chan and I are in complete agreement.
But it’s important to acknowledge, to appreciate, and to support the fact that art does not have to be any of those things. Art does not exist solely to be a passion play that society draws inspiration from. I am not and ought not be bound to tell only morally uncomplicated, Manichean stories, even if I often choose to. And I think that during this time of compounding crisis and growing evil, it’s short-sighted and even pernicious to argue works of art should return to an easily parsed, uplifting moral code—one that, for all its black-and-white, often goes undefined, and which changes based on which lesson you want to “learn.”