

But should the player load the game again, they will be confronted by a character, who (because of the machinations of the narrative) remains as meta-aware as the player. In the “golden ending” of the game, the characters all achieve the best of all possible worlds, and the game ends happily ever after. Thus, with that added scrutiny comes a question of moral culpability. Undertale does away with the veil that separates the player from the game, and, perhaps, it renders the entire idea of that separation erroneous in every other video game, implying that simply because the player feels disconnected from the results of their actions doesn’t mean that there aren’t any results of taking action. This running commentary on the player’s actions means that there’s a constant judgment being made about the way that the player treats the characters in the game.
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These characters are aware of the player’s actions no matter how many times the game is reset, and they comment on that, occasionally reaching out to affect the player’s save files, future playthroughs, and even the software of the game itself. Undertale undoes that order by making several characters in the game aware of the player’s existence. The common factor among these options is that the player is not “part” of the game, but is somehow observing it playing out. One can consider the player to be a kind of god or to be the inscrutability of fate or even to be the subconscious of the game’s characters. In most video games, though, the player is regarded as something completely disconnected from the world of the game. Conversely, when we treat animals cruelly, we run the risk of making exploitation and callousness easier for ourselves and allowing us to treat others as means instead of as ends. Therefore, when we treat animals with kindness and consideration, this is a form of practice that refines our ability to treat others with kindness and consideration. Instead, one utilizes one’s self-awareness and reason to become good.

In Kant’s mind, it is the continual refinement of one’s behavior that leads to becoming a better person. He claimed that we don’t owe any moral consideration to animals themselves, but it is obligatory to treat animals with as much dignity and kindness as possible in order to indirectly fulfill our duties to other humans. Kant’s justification is perhaps intellectually unpalatable to modern animal-rights advocates, but it is consistent with his radically anthropocentric ethical theory. Kant gave a short philosophical exegesis, recorded in the Lectures on Ethics, in which he questioned how the ethical person can justify kindness to animals when most ethical theory places humans at their center because of the importance of human agency and self-awareness to ethics. Kant was concerned with how humans, as autonomous, rational beings, are not synonymous with objects and must be respected as subjects instead. Kant argued in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals that morality is fundamentally rooted in the idea that one should view our treatment of others as not merely a means to our own ends, but as an a means of advancing the greater ends of humanity itself. For our purposes, we turn to Kant’s innovations in ethics. Kant was a prodigious thinker, influencing theology, epistemology, and the Enlightenment. However, Undertale stands apart from those games because it raises a unique philosophical question.Ī bit of philosophical history: Immanuel Kant lived and did his work in the Prussian city of Königsberg in Preußen during the latter portion of the 18th century. Even 1999’s Omikron: the Nomad Soul attempted to bring the player- qua-player into the world of the game. Games like The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide are recent examples of games interested in “playing with the player”. This isn’t to say that Undertale was the first video game to include a narrative. Undertale, the recent game by Toby Fox, set off a storm of interest in the idea of the “metanarrative”: a narrative that raises questions about a game’s inner structure and the role of the player in that structure. This essay contains spoilers for Undertale
