Threat Level Orange

There’s a line in the action movie Parker delivered by the eponymous main character: “I don’t hurt anyone who doesn’t deserve it.” Here’s the problem with that: he’s also the person deciding who deserves it. With no balance to this check, Parker’s assurance is meaningless. He can hurt anyone at any time because he can arbitrarily decide at any time that any given person deserves to be hurt.

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Indie game developer Jason Rohrer stirred up controversy with his latest game, Castle Doctrine. It’s a competitive multiplayer game in which you take the role of a husband with a wife, a kid, and a house full of valuables. If you don’t equip your house with state-of-the-art anti-burglary defenses, burglars will break in, kill your family, and steal your valuables. To afford those defenses, you must break into other people’s houses, kill their families, and steal their valuables.

You might be tempted to think of this as reverse psychology — an artistic treatment of the subject that’s supposed to repulse you to get its point across, namely that the preemptive strike approach to personal safety ultimately results in everyone being far less safe and “the only winning move is not to play”. It's a lesson that real AIs in a real game actually learned when someone left a first-person shooter running for four years with robot players and peace broke out.

But Rohrer says that wasn’t his intent. He says he made a game based on his actual worldview, in particular, that anyone who enters your house without permission no longer deserves to live. “For me, as soon as you stick your foot across my windowsill I just feel like that’s it. You’ve violated the contract, right. I’m not sticking my foot across your windowsill.” He developed this philosophy after neighbors were robbed and a dog attacked his wife.

This stirred vigorous backlash in certain corners of the game development community.

How okay Jason Rohrer is [with] murdering animals and people makes me extremely uncomfortable. How do I have a contract with someone I’ve met twice? Where is the contract? Can I read it? What else can I get killed for?

They objected to the notion that one single person can unilaterally determine when other humans do and do not deserve to live, irrespective of law or society. They proposed that Rohrer’s conclusions are the result not of reason, but of an emotional overreaction to a situation that his privileged social status isolated him from until recently. Cameron Kunzelman writes an analysis of Rohrer’s game and his interview statements about it, arguing that self defense is totally justifiable as a general concept but that Rohrer’s attitude about it exceeds the bounds of reason. Cameron points out that in Castle Doctrine, nearly 100% of all home burglaries end in murder, but in Rohrer’s real life city as of two years ago, the number of murders total was only about 1% the number of burglaries (and, implicitly, that the number of specifically burglary-related murders was a mere fraction of that), thus indicating that Rohrer’s view of crime and criminals — and thus what constitutes an appropriate response to them — isn’t grounded in reality.

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There’s an article I read recently called “Schrödinger’s Rapist” that exposed me to a very different world view. In the intervening time, I’ve leaned heavily toward the attitude that you don’t get to determine other people’s feelings about you. You don’t decide whether you’re threatening to other people. Only other people possess that authority. Likewise, you don’t decide whether you are offensive, or insulting, or fun to be around. Other people, and only other people, get to decide those things. You may not intend to be threatening. You may even want and try and hope to be unthreatening. But if other people feel threatened, then you have threatened them. Really. They didn’t make it up just to get you in trouble. They may have poor reasons for their feelings, like their parents/society have taught them that Your Kind is dangerous, but their feelings are no less legitimate.

Then I read this article by the large, black, male drummer for a Grammy-winning hip-hop group, talking about how all his life he’s scared people by being a large, black male. Talking about how putting other people’s fearful thoughts of him above his own thoughts of himself has harmed and dehumanized him. And suddenly I was seeing the other side of the story. It sure as hell didn’t sound like the usual, unconvincing counterargument, the one scummy Men’s Rights Activists use about how they shouldn’t have to stop hitting on a girl who “just wants to be left alone” because they’re only trying to be friendly and she’s objectively wrong to view the attention as anything other than a compliment…the argument that your intended meaning is the only thing that matters, and if they read you wrong, it’s entirely their problem (and probably intentional anyway).

So now I’m back to not really knowing.