Ethics and Games Series: Observer by Sherry Jones (Aug. 19, 2018)

Ethics & Games: Observer
Sherry Jones | Philosophy & Game Studies | Twitter @autnes

About this Presentation
This presentation was featured at the International Society for Technology in
Education (ISTE) Games and Simulations Network live webcast on August 19,
2018.
The live webcast video was recorded and made available on Youtube, as well as
made available in this presentation.
Please feel free to watch the video while exploring the presentation.

First Person Psychological Horror Indie Game
❖ Observer (2017) is a first person psychological horror indie game developed
and published by Aspyr.
❖ Released on Playstation 4, XBox One, MS Windows, MacOS, Linux.
❖ Received recognition for its immersive world design:
➢ Winner - Best Setting in Game Informer's 2017 Adventure Game of the
Year Awards.
➢ Runner-up - Best World award at Giant Bomb's 2017 Game of the Year
Awards.

Game Story: Key Plot Points 1 of 3
❖ In the year 2034, a cybernetic revolution enabled
body augmentation with implants via
nano-machines.
❖ The Great Plague of 2047 occurred with the
nanophage, a software glitch-induced disease
that transmits to bodies of augmented humans
via wireless networks. The disease attacks both
digital and biological human apparatuses.
❖ In 2059, a global nuclear war broke out and
destroyed Europe. Chiron Incorporated seized
control and established a military-run state called
the Fifth Polish Republic in Poland.

❖ In the year 2084, Daniel Lazarski is
a neural detective, also known as
an “Observer,” working for Krakow
Police Department (KPD).
❖ Daniel’s job is to obtain information
for Chiron by hacking into people’s
brains, whether the hacked person
is dead or alive.
❖ Daniel got a surprise, wireless call
from his estranged son, Adam.

❖ After Adam’s distress call abruptly
disconnects, Daniel traces Adam’s
wireless signal. The trace leads to a
living quarter in Class C District,
home to VR and Hologram addicts.
❖ When Daniel enters Adam’s
apartment, he discovers a brutally
murdered headless corpse, sitting
in the middle of the room.
❖ Daniel seeks to discover whether
the corpse is his son, Adam.

Game Situations and Themes
❖ Observer, as a first person psychological horror game, contains violent
scenes and explicit language, and is more appropriate for mature
players.
❖ Themes: Body modification (biohacking), neural hacking, plutocracy,
corporatocracy, authoritarianism, excessive government intervention,
oppression, loss of liberty, government surveillance; resistance, virtual
reality, hologram, addiction, personhood, identity.

⧞ Philosophies
Relevant to the Game

Animalism
❖ Animalism is the view that all human beings are animals. This view:
➢ Rejects the mind/body distinction that the mind and the body are
separate entities.
➢ Rejects the notion that human beings are simply material bodies, or have
mental states separate from the body.
➢ Rejects the Human/Person distinction that personal identity is formed
psychologically separate from the human body.
➢ Asserts that a “person” is not separate from the human. Rather, a
“person” is a phase or a function of the same developing human.

David Hume’s Personal Identity Theory
❖ Philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) offers a
personal identity theory (animalist identity
theory) to explain what, exactly, a “person” is.
❖ Hume considers the identity of a “person” as a
psychological “phase” that the body
experiences. The body and the mind are not
separate; the body offers sensory apparatuses,
and the mind receives perceptions through
those sensory apparatuses.
❖ The personal identity “phase” is composed of a
chain of mental events related by causality.

In latter half of this presentation, we will discuss the
ethics of cybernetically augmenting humans in the
world of the Observer through Humean personal
identity theory.

Game Rhetoric About the Neural Detective
❖ The game shows that although Daniel Lazarki, a neural detective, is supposed
to be a government’s tool of oppression, he himself is very much monitored
and controlled by the Krakow Police Department (KPD).
❖ In the game’s counterfactual future, the government has great invasive
powers, being able to access and control one’s biological functions and
thoughts.
❖ Notice that Lazarki was asked to “shoot up” by his commanding officer with
the justification that the act was for his health.
❖ Lazarki also acknowledges his plight when he tells Adam: “Careful what you
say. This is a monitored channel.”

⧞ Government Controlled
Cybernetic Augmentation

Game Rhetoric on Biohackers (Cybernetic
Augmenters)
❖ The game does not offer an optimistic view of cybernetic
augmentation. The landlord is an example supporting this view:
➢ The landlord shown is a cybernetically augmented human.
➢ Being augmented, his reaction time to Lazarki’s questions is slow.
➢ The landlord is aggressive (although he could simply be alarmed
by police presence).
➢ The landlord also has difficulty with accessing memory.

⧞ Class C District of Virtual Reality and
Hologram Addicts (Escape from Reality)

Game Rhetoric on VR and Holograms
❖ The game does not offer an optimistic view of how virtual reality (VR)
and hologram technologies will be used in the future. Here’s the logic:
➢ Premise: Most drug addicts use drugs to mentally escape from
their despair about their reality.
➢ Premise: VR and hologram technologies are ways for the mind to
enter into a fictional world, one that is not reality.
➢ ∴ VR and hologram technologies will be the new drugs of the
future for helping the mind escape reality.

⧞ Investigation of the Possible Murder of
Adam Lazarski + Lockdown Initiated

Game Rhetoric on Adam Lazarski
❖ The game scene offers evidence that reveals Adam Lazarski might be a
revolutionary working against the Fifth Polish Republic.
❖ Adam might have orchestrated a bombing of a Chiron government building.
❖ A nice reference to George Orwell’s 1984 appears in this scene, hinting at the
extent of government overreach into people’s private lives.
❖ The division between public and private spheres is dissolved/destroyed when
the government has access and control over augmented bodily apparatuses.
❖ Cybernetic augmentation technology is used for mass surveillance and
control (technological control and loss of individual liberty are the real fears).

⧞ Resistance through Hacking

Game Rhetoric on the Limit of Technology
❖ Just as current wireless and internet-connected technologies, such as IoTs,
self-driving cars, smart homes, have the problem of being hackable, so are the
future technologies shown in the game.
❖ Some citizens seem to be able to corrupt data and evade police detection.
❖ Since the game suggests that the brain and the body can be hacked, the
game is arguing that the mind/consciousness can be freed from the body.
❖ Hence, Lazarki is resisting the possibility that the corpse belongs to his son,
Adam, by stating: “Adam . . . so this is your apartment. Doesn’t mean it’s your
body.” The word “it” is used to objectify the body as a non-entity.

⧞ Adam’s Computer: News of Insurgence

⧞ Lockdown + Fear of the Nanophage +
Fear of the Cleaners

Game Rhetoric on the Nanophage
❖ Nanophage is a disease that spreads through wireless connections and can
infect the mind and the body of those who have been cybernetically
augmented.
❖ A lockdown is initiated in this scene. The Nanophage is treated like a
pandemic like plague.
❖ The residents panic because they have not received prior warnings about the
lockdown.
❖ The government seems to offer no chance for examination to those
suspected for contracting the disease. This is evidenced by the residents
fear of “The Cleaners” coming to get them.

⧞ The Immaculates (Unaugmented Humans)

Game Rhetoric on the Immaculates
❖ We learn that corporations expect citizens to undergo cybernetic
augmentation in order to obtain jobs. Jobs, in the world of the Observer,
demand efficiency from technologically-modified human workers.
❖ Immaculates refer to those whose minds and bodies have not undergone
cybernetic augmentation and are free from government invasion.
❖ The term, immaculate, means “perfection and cleanliness.” In the Roman
Catholic sense, immaculate means to be “free from sin.”
❖ The game does not offer a favorable view of immaculates; it depicts the
immaculates as “holier than thou” religious zealots who are sinners by being
prideful and by feeling disdain for the augmented others.

⧞ SPOILER AHEAD! THE ENDING!

About the Ending (1 of 2)
❖ Daniel Lazarki discovered that the headless corpse was, indeed, Adam
Lazarski, his son.
❖ Daniel later found his son’s severed head, but was contacted by Adam’s
consciousness to not make neural connections with the severed head, as it
had been infected with a virus.
❖ Adam’s consciousness revealed that he was hiding in Sanctuary, an
abandoned virtual reality salon, because Chiron discovered that he was
stealing Chiron’s data.
❖ It was Adam’s consciousness that killed the original Adam (his body) who
worked with Chiron to send a virus to Adam’s consciousness to destroy it.

About the Ending (2 of 2)
❖ Adam asks to transfer his consciousness into Daniel’s mind for preservation,
whether or not Daniel accepts this proposal.
❖ Before the transfer of Adam’s consciousness could be done, the KPD arrives
and kills Daniel.
❖ “The lockdown,” essentially, was used by the government to track down a
criminal, not to capture those who contracted the Nanophage disease.
❖ What Does This Mean?: “The lockdown” revealed that the government was
using the narrative of the Nanophage to terrorize and control the citizens.
Usurpers/political dissenters were removed by this method.

Applying Philosophy
and Ethics of
Animalism and
Hume’s Personal
Identity Theory to
Examine the Game,
Observer

A Review of Animalism
❖ Animalism is the view that all human beings are animals. This view:
➢ Rejects the mind/body distinction that the mind and the body are
separate entities.
➢ Rejects the notion that human beings are simply material bodies, or have
mental states separate from the body.
➢ Rejects the Human/Person distinction that personal identity is formed
psychologically separate from the human body.
➢ Asserts that the “person” is not separate from the human. Rather, a
“person” is a phase or a function of the same developing human.

On the Causality of Mental Events
In The Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume explains that identity does not
belong to the mind, but that it is composed of our perceptions (or mental events
conceived from observations of the physical world). In other words, identity comes
from our perceptions of the world and does not originate from the mind:
“And here [in the case of personal identity] ’tis evident, the same method of
reasoning must be continu’d ...The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man,
is only a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetables
and animal bodies. It cannot, therefore, have a different origin, but must proceed
from a like operation of the imagination upon like objects.” (259)
(Book 1, Section 4, par. 15).

On the Causality of Mental Events
In The Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume explains the role of the human mind
the formation of personal identity, which is a “system of different perceptions”:
“We may observe, that the true idea of the human mind, is to consider it as a
system of different perceptions or different existences, which are link’d together
by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and
modify each other. Our impressions give rise to their correspondent ideas; and
these ideas in their turn produce other impressions. ...as the same individual
republic may not only change its members, but also its laws and constitutions; in
like manner the same person may vary his character and disposition, as well as his
impressions and ideas, without losing his identity. Whatever changes he endures,
his several parts are still connected by the relation of causation”
(Book 1, Section 4, par. 19).

⧞ Applying Animalist Ethics to Observer

Connection Between Animalist Ethics and
Observer (1 of 4)
❖ Using Hume’s Personal Identity Theory, the following interpretations of
the cybernetically augmented humans and the separation of
consciousness and body in the world of the Observer could be made:
❖ Since animalism asserts that the mind and the body are connected
and mutually influential, the cybernetically augmented humans are
destroying their human identity, or turning themselves as a new
species; they are using modified bodily apparatuses to experience the
world, produce perceptions that are unlike ones formed by human
bodies.

Observer (2 of 4)
❖ If personal identity (in the Humean sense) is but a psychological
phase composed of mental events that are related by cause and
effect, and that mental events are perceptions formed by bodily
senses, then divorcing consciousness from the brain/body is
impossible.
❖ Uploading consciousness to the wireless network, for example, would
mean that only a “phase” of a person is uploaded to the network.

Observer (3 of 4)
❖ For Hume, identity is a “system of different perceptions or different
existences, which are link’d together by the relation of cause and effect, and
mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other.”
❖ Therefore, Adam’s “consciousness” that is uploaded to the wireless network is
but an “illusion” of Adam created by perceptions.
❖ Since personal identity is but a mere phase/product of the body and the mind,
the identity of the original Adam produced by the mind and body is gone.

Observer (4 of 4)
❖ Ethics is a system of moral codes for ensuring the survival of human
societies.
❖ Animalist ethicist would argue that since cybernetically augmenting one’s
body involves changing one’s human nature, or destroying the “human” that
forms society, then it would be unethical to engage in body augmentation.
❖ A new type of ethics would have to be developed for the non-animals.
❖ Currently, there are ethicist who are trying to develop ethics for robots. New
laws for biohackers, neural hackers, and robots may have to be created.

Presentation by:
Sherry Jones
Philosophy & Game Studies SME Lecturer,
Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design
ISTE Games and Simulations Network Leader
http://about.me/sherryjones
Twitter @autnes
sherryjones.edtech@gmail.com

Ethics and Games Series: Observer by Sherry Jones (Aug. 19, 2018)

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