The Multiverse and the Ethics of Video Games
One friday afternoon after school, I sat down at my computer and began to play a game. As I played, the same question kept popping up in my head over and over again,”why does this matter?, Why should I care what is happening on screen?”. As I continued to play, an idea struck me, what if I was seeing the characters, events, and lives of an alternate world? What if every death in a game was a real death somewhere. What if my choices mattered? As it turns out, many scientists have wondered the same events, except on the grander scale of life itself. Their findings and research are all culminated into one pool of knowledge known as the Multiverse theory
The Multiverse Theory and Mass Effect
The Multiverse …show more content…
This brings forth possibly the most important issue with the multiverse, the ethics of it all. Multiversal ethics points out how, for every possible event(creating a multiverse), there is a universe where things ended badly. There may be a universe where a close call turned into a car accident, paralyzing someone from the waist down, or someone’s common cold turning into a fatal disease. Every event becomes a coin toss, as an individual reading this paper, you may have died hundreds of times in other universes, but you were the lucky version that won all the coin tosses. This concept is further reinforced by the concept of multiversal russian roulette.If a person had a revolver that could fire across existance, between universes, the person holding the gun could fire all 6 shots and be totally fine, but in 6 other universes, 6 other versions of that person are lying on the floor with a bullet in their brains. This raises a massive moral dilemma, would a person think much more carefully about actions if in another universe they failed? Would every thought be made with deeper thought and concern? or reckless …show more content…
SOMA begins in Toronto, Canada in the year 2015, average person Simon Jared has just signed up to be part of a test where his brain will be scanned and stored as an effort to allow human consciousness to be stored. All is going according to plan until Simon sits in the chair and begins the scan. Upon the conclusion of the scan, Simon finds himself alone in a dark room, deep underwater. Through some investigation, Simon soon discovers that he is now somehow aboard Pathos-II, a research base built on the ocean floor, designed for deep sea and space research, as well as launching satellites into space via its kinetic gun. Pathos-II is completely abandoned and in a state of complete disrepair, with this odd black goo on the walls and robots moving around believing that they are living people. One of these machines, calling herself Catherine quickly explains that herself and all of those human-like robots are all filled with the brain scans of Catherine’s now dead coworkers, revealing that Simon is also a scan that had been uploaded into a robot body. She also explains that it is now the year 2025, and all life on Earth, except for Pathos-II, was wiped out by a massive comet that struck the planet. After the disaster, Pathos-II was heavily damaged and slowly failing. This prompted the creation of the ARK project, a virtual
One friday afternoon after school, I sat down at my computer and began to play a game. As I played, the same question kept popping up in my head over and over again,”why does this matter?, Why should I care what is happening on screen?”. As I continued to play, an idea struck me, what if I was seeing the characters, events, and lives of an alternate world? What if every death in a game was a real death somewhere. What if my choices mattered? As it turns out, many scientists have wondered the same events, except on the grander scale of life itself. Their findings and research are all culminated into one pool of knowledge known as the Multiverse theory
The Multiverse Theory and Mass Effect
The Multiverse …show more content…
This brings forth possibly the most important issue with the multiverse, the ethics of it all. Multiversal ethics points out how, for every possible event(creating a multiverse), there is a universe where things ended badly. There may be a universe where a close call turned into a car accident, paralyzing someone from the waist down, or someone’s common cold turning into a fatal disease. Every event becomes a coin toss, as an individual reading this paper, you may have died hundreds of times in other universes, but you were the lucky version that won all the coin tosses. This concept is further reinforced by the concept of multiversal russian roulette.If a person had a revolver that could fire across existance, between universes, the person holding the gun could fire all 6 shots and be totally fine, but in 6 other universes, 6 other versions of that person are lying on the floor with a bullet in their brains. This raises a massive moral dilemma, would a person think much more carefully about actions if in another universe they failed? Would every thought be made with deeper thought and concern? or reckless …show more content…
SOMA begins in Toronto, Canada in the year 2015, average person Simon Jared has just signed up to be part of a test where his brain will be scanned and stored as an effort to allow human consciousness to be stored. All is going according to plan until Simon sits in the chair and begins the scan. Upon the conclusion of the scan, Simon finds himself alone in a dark room, deep underwater. Through some investigation, Simon soon discovers that he is now somehow aboard Pathos-II, a research base built on the ocean floor, designed for deep sea and space research, as well as launching satellites into space via its kinetic gun. Pathos-II is completely abandoned and in a state of complete disrepair, with this odd black goo on the walls and robots moving around believing that they are living people. One of these machines, calling herself Catherine quickly explains that herself and all of those human-like robots are all filled with the brain scans of Catherine’s now dead coworkers, revealing that Simon is also a scan that had been uploaded into a robot body. She also explains that it is now the year 2025, and all life on Earth, except for Pathos-II, was wiped out by a massive comet that struck the planet. After the disaster, Pathos-II was heavily damaged and slowly failing. This prompted the creation of the ARK project, a virtual