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I spent an afternoon working on creating a list of the appropriate virtues for a Paladin. It was interesting to think of how many virtues would be useful. 2-3 seemed too few. 15 or 20 seemed perhaps too many. Given my background in Chinese martial arts and Yijing theory, for no particular reason I decided to start with 8. I could always add or remove some if needed.

 

As the afternoon went by, the varied lists I was creating and discarding started seeming very familiar. Strangely so. More and more I felt like I’d seen nearly these exact virtues before, but long, long ago.

 

 

As it turns out, I had.

 

 

Life is truly strange sometimes. As a child, I grew up partly on a sailboat with my father. He was technologically advanced enough that we had an early computer on the boat with us. There isn’t much to do a lot of the time while at sea - it’s not like you can go for a walk, and we didn’t have a TV. As a consequence, I read a tremendous amount, and played many, many hours of computer games. I had perhaps a few dozen games, but there was one that I played more than any other. More than all the others combined, actually. My father once did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and estimated that over the course of the several years that I played the game, I had put in over 2000 hours. That’s more hours than a full-time job for an entire year.

 

 

The game that I played was the fifth game in a series of fantasy role-playing games. I didn’t have the first four, and didn’t know anything about the series when I picked it.

 

 

I still haven’t played through the whole series, so if anything I say here isn’t accurate, forgive me.

 

 

The series was called Ultima, and the first 3 games in the series were evidently fairly straightforward fantasy games. You had, depending on the game, a hero or a party of heroes. There was a villain aiming at world domination or destruction. You journeyed across the land, fighting monsters, getting treasure, gaining experience, visiting towns, and so on. Eventually you fought and killed the big bad boss and won the game. For each sequel, the plot was basically the same. “The last evil was defeated, but they had an apprentice” etc.

 

 

But by the fourth game, the one directly preceding the one I owned, the creator had gotten bored with the repetition. Or perhaps was just inspired to see what else could be done. What kind of stories could be told using the medium of a computer game?

 

 

So in the fourth game there was no big bad boss intent on world domination. Instead, the wise ruler of the land decided to create a society based on virtuous living. Each of the virtues had a town associated with it, where people specialized in the study and practice of that particular virtue. And a call was put out for one person to step forward to master the practice of all the virtues and become an avatar of virtue.

 

 

The player, of course, was that person, and for the first time in a game like this, your job was just to become a good person. The game didn’t tell you all the details immediately on how to do this. Instead, for example, you might visit the town devoted to Compassion. Wise people there would tell you, if you asked, that to be compassionate you should not chase down fleeing enemies or kill wild animals that were not evil. If you were to visit the shrine of Compassion and meditate, the shrine might tell you that you were not yet compassionate enough, and to go become a better person and then come back.

 

 

The game gave you opportunities to lie, steal, brag, be cruel, show cowardice, and so on, and behind the scenes it kept track of your choices.

 

 

There were still monsters and fights and treasures and swords and such, but that wasn’t the ultimate point of the game.

 

 

In the game I played, the one right afterwards, you have already become the Avatar of Virtue, but in the time between games 4 and 5, the wise ruler disappeared and the practice of the virtues had become corrupted. Your job was to restore good to the land.

 

 

I loved this game. I lived inside it. It was like a living world to me, and one where the choices and people mattered. Interestingly, I never actually beat it, I think because it would have felt like robbing myself to just rush through the game to the ending.

 

 

So, years later, in my attempt to learn how to become a better Paladin, I was drawing up my lists of 8 oddly familiar virtues, and puzzling over my sense of deja-vu. And then I remembered those thousands of hours inside a world where your job was to become a warrior of virtue, to go into the darkness and lead the land into the light. And you had to master 8 virtues to do so.

 

 

The game creator, Richard Garriott, talked in an interview about how he created the virtues. He did an excellent job - he researched many religions and philosophies and thought deeply. Eventually he based everything upon 3 core principles: Truth, Love, and Courage. Those do seem nicely fundamental. He also admits to being a fan of the Wizard of Oz, where our heroine is accompanied on her journey by three helpers, representing Truth, Love, and Courage.

 

 

So each of the three principles generates a pure virtue: Truth creates Honesty, Love creates Compassion, and Courage creates Valor. Then the combination of each pair of the pure virtues creates three mixed virtues: Truth and Love creates Justice (truth tempered by love), Truth and Courage creates Honor (the courage to seek and stand up for the truth), and Love and Courage creates Sacrifice (the courage to give of oneself in name of love).

 

 

Mixing all three principles produces a virtue he decided to call Spirituality, which is a generalized “Are you doing good or ill in your life? Are you making things better or worse with your actions?”

 

 

So now we have every combination of the three core principles, and we’ve produced 7 virtues. What is left when we lack all three principles? An anti-virtue. Garriott decided to call this “Pride”, where we are so full of our own ego and flaws that we don’t leave room for Truth or Love or Courage. How do we overcome Pride? By practicing the 8th virtue, Humility. Not strictly part of Truth, Love, or Courage, Humility creates the space for each of the three principles to exist and guide our actions. It allows our lives to be about something larger than us.

 

 

I don’t think I can do a better job than this. So our job as Paladins (a concept based on fantasy literature) now has its virtues (drawn from an old computer game).

 

 

Honesty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, Honor, Sacrifice, Spirituality, Humility

 

 

Like in the game, we should meditate upon each of these, seek to cultivate them, and follow them in our actions.

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