The morality of zoos

A thoughtful colleague, Gene Koo, recently sent me a draft of a paper on moral development and video games. In the paper, Gene quotes a brief excerpt from a paper (Stevens, Saticz, and McCarthy 2008) about a 15 year old girl playing Zoo Tycoon:

In her everyday life, Rachel and her family cared for stray and abandoned cats awaiting adoption through a local animal shelter. We often observed her readily pause her game play to monitor a cat’s health or attend to its needs. In-game however, Rachel’s decisions about the animals she was caring for as zookeeper were driven by monetary gain rather than the happiness or well-being of the animals. For example, while creating a zoo for different types of cats (e.g., tigers, lions, and leopards), Rachel learned of a new birth in her zoo and responded by selling the newborn animals immediately.

So, naturally, this leads one to wonder what kind of lessons kids learn playing the game.

Rachel behaves immorally towards the animals in her virtual zoo, so perhaps the game is teaching her bad moral lessons.

To be fair, Gene and his co-author use the excerpt to make a more subtle point, suggesting (as I have also argued) that the moments Rachel has for reflection on the game matter to what she learns, as does the approach that she herself takes playing the role of zookeeper.

But it seems to me that there is another important point here. Rachel is clearly learning is a valuable lesson about zoos: that they are often run as businesses, and that leads to decisions that are not always in the animals’ best interest. We can’t be sure, of course, whether she understands her experience as being about how zoos treat animals or about how she should treat animals–though I rather suspect in her case that what she’s learning is either that she doesn’t want to be a zookeeper because it will mean she can’t always treat animals as well as she would like, or that if she is in that position she will have to fight against the economic imperatives of the business side of zoos. Either way, that seems like it would be quite a positive moral lesson.

And this, it seems to me, is the real idea behind epistemic games: not just that we can model prosocial ways of thinking (although that is one good use of the games), but that we can give players an understanding of why decisions in the world get made the way they do–and that things that seem immoral happen not always because a specific person is immoral, but because the system itself constrains actions and provides incentives that are problematic.