Right now I'm playing through video game called Fallout 3.

In this game there is a segment where you enter into a virtual reality recreation of a 1950s suburb.

You're trying to get information about your father, but the individual who has the information requires that you go through a series of sadistic acts before she will talk to you.

So for example, this person asks you to break up a marriage and poison's someone's dog.

However, you do not HAVE to do any of it. If you look around you can find a way to undermine this individual and find out the information without hurting anyone. But the most direct way is the most sadistic.

While I was playing through this section I was totally reminded of Milgram's study. I thought. What a neat idea. You're presented as the player with a series of moral choices. Is it worth it to you to make this group of individuals suffer just to satisfy your own personal needs, or do you question the authority figure and try to find a solution that does not involve completing the sadistic tasks you're given.

Thanks for posting these videos, I've been totally interested to go back and watch this footage after recently being reminded of Milgram's study.

Ryan, I'd be interested to know if the game offers some sort of reward for making the moral choices in the game.

Hi Gwen...some embeddable parts of the Milgram videos on You Tube...I just showed it in my class on Monday --

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3AbOZVk6Yc&eurl

Yes it does. Actually, that's sort of a large part of the 'fun' of the game. As you play through the game you make choices which effect the world and it's characters positively and negatively.

You can make choices which will dramatically effect the entire game. Say you walk into a town and kill everyone. Then you will lose the opportunity to interact with those characters and whole huge sections of hte game will be lost to you.

But certain other 'evil' characters might befriend you and open up other options. It get pretty layered.

It's totally fascinating. There's a mission in which you have to track down an android who is an escaped slave. I won't go into it in detail here, but I was thinkinga about that section of the game for a few weeks.

I find it relevant, when discussing this study, to also talk about Philip Zimbardo's "Stanford Prison Experiment". In a similar way, that experiment crossed some pretty major ethical boundaries that we would recognize today (the role of the experimenter, for instance, is very well defined nowadays, but Zimbardo essentially lost all objectivity and became a part of the play-acting of the experiment), but didn't have a precedent for at the time. The website Zimbardo created, once he began to make money by comparing his experiment to Abu Ghraib and war torture, is here: http://www.prisonexp.org/
and there are lots of critiques of his work available as well, easy to find via a google search.

very interesting parallels between the game and milgrams experiement. and thanks for the link to the zimbardo website.

This gave me goosebumps.