From being unable to harvest ‘little sister’ characters but happy to kill others freely, to playing the Legend of Zelda as a vegan – gaming ethics are complex and highly personal
can kill foxes but I can’t kill wolves. Not in real life, obviously – in real life I send emails eight hours a day – but in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, where every animal is an arrow away from becoming a fortifying meal. Shoot a wolf and you’ll be rewarded with a thick red slab of raw prime meat, but I can’t do it, I just can’t do it, even though they often attack me in packs. They look too much like dogs.
Tom, who is now 42 years old and lives in Alabama, felt sorrow and disgust when he reached the game’s first boss and realised he would have to sacrifice his newfound friends. So he conscientiously objected and returned the game. Despite this, he can play games where he needs to kill people in self-defence, or where the actions of the protagonist are explicitly presented as immoral.
“When playing PowerWash Simulator I refused to spend any of the in-game currency I earned on buying the various upgrades,” says Will Cooling, a 37-year-old diversity manager from the West Midlands. As a boy, Cooling used to help hose down the fridges and workstations at his dad’s butchers – the game reminded him of this, so Cooling sought to play authentically. “It wasn’t like my dad would let me buy new tools if I encountered a bad stain!” he says.
Still, explicitly violent games can cross the line for some gamers. Seth Katz, a 42-year-old hospital vice-president in Kansas, finds himself unable to harvest the “little sister” characters in the underwater adventure, BioShock, even though doing so would help him upgrade faster in the game. Charlotte, a 33-year-old film festival worker from Glasgow, has more specific Zelda rules. While she does eat meat in the game, she doesn’t kill foxes, crows, small birds or goats. She also avoids killing enemies when they’re wearing little backpacks full of fruit. “It feels like they’re kind of busy doing their gathering and not doing any harm. They have to survive in the world like I do,” she argues.
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