1. END GAME - The Ethics of Spoiling
I made two immediate and diametrically opposed moral judgements the first Monday back to work after the Easter holidays of 2019. The first came before the morning bell. A student in my form entered the classroom early, but excited.
“Did you watch Game of Thrones, sir?”, he asked.
“The latest one?”, I asked. “The one that was on last night when you should have been sleeping?”
“That’s the one, sir. It was sick!”
“Did you stay up and watch it live?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What time did it end?”
“Just after four, sir. But it was worth it. Do you watch Game of Thrones?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Then I won’t spoil it for you, sir. But watch it as soon as you get home. Did you watch Endgame over the holidays, sir?”
I told him that I had. His face lit up, and then fell.
“I still haven’t seen it and I’m worried someone’s going to spoil it for me.”
Just then another student came into the room.
“Did you see it?”, he asked the boy I was talking to.
“Yeah - but don’t say anything. Sir hasn’t seen it yet.”
I was touched that the student wanted to protect my enjoyment, and remained touched as the rest of my form filed into the room and were repeatedly warned against spoiling the TV show for me.
“Did you watch Endgame over the holidays?”, another kid asked me.
“Yes,” I laughed. “But he hasn’t yet, so no spoilers.”
It was nice seeing this strange moral code adhered to for the next twenty minutes of registration. We all caught up on what we’d done over the holidays, shared concerns about the upcoming exams, and left without anyone letting anything slip about either Endgame or Game of Thrones.
That was the first moral judgement I made: that these were good people for doing so. They had seen an opportunity to potentially ruin somebody’s fun but had chosen not to. The culmination of Marvel’s twenty-one film series in the epic, three hour plus, Avengers: Endgame, had grossed 1.22 billion dollars in the first three days of its release and we were only now living in day four of the phenomenon. Meanwhile, the third episode of the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones shown overnight was watched by 17.8 million viewers. It was the most expensive piece of television ever made and featured the long-awaited “Battle of Winterfell”. In both pieces of entertainment significant events took place in the respective fictional universes that fans had been waiting for for years and they wanted to enjoy those events unfolding “spoiler-free”, with no prior knowledge of what would happen on the screen. The high viewing figures and record-smashing box office returns was evidence of this as people desperately tried ensuring they were first in line to watch their respective series climaxes before damaging spoilers were released into the world. I was happy my entire form were the sort of people who understood this without needing it explained to them. Nothing more needed to be said than “they haven’t seen it yet” for lips to snap shut and voices to still.
Which is why my second moral judgement came fast and without reservation when the bell rang to signal the end of recess later that day and my Year 10 GCSE class piled into the room, three of them shouting repeatedly at the top of their voices the name of a specific character from Endgame and yelling out the fact that they die in the film. Their unrepentant repetition of this spoiler, and clear distress it caused on the faces of some of their classmates who had yet to see the movie, made me immediately lambast those students in my mind and label them as moral monsters as I reminded them of my expectations for silence at the start of a lesson. There was no school rule on the books which would allow me to give out detentions for spoiling a movie, but in that moment I really felt that there should be.
So what was going on here? Were the Year 10 students really somehow morally reprehensible for revealing key information about a movie millions of people around the world and half the school had already seen? Were the students in my form really somehow morally better for their silence? If a moral wrong actually took place here (or a moral good), what exactly was it?
At first analysis the answer seems obvious. It’s even in the name: spoiler. A spoiler is wrong because it spoils a piece of entertainment by revealing information which makes it a less enjoyable experience now that this specific element of surprise is gone. The moral wrong lies in ruining someone’s potential good time by impoverishing it in this way when the decision to do so was unnecessary and avoidable. I say avoidable, rather than malicious, because while malicious spoiling feels self-evidently shabby, sometimes we spoil things without meaning to. Whether I tell you who the killer is at the end of the murder mystery because I intentionally want to ruin it for you, or just because I am not thinking and let the information slip out by accident, the consequence is the same: the mystery is ruined (and if I had been more thoughtful about what I was saying, such an accident could have been avoided). There is a moral difference. But like the moral difference between murder and manslaughter, the status of the victim in each case remains identical despite the differing levels of culpability on the part of the transgressor.
As an argument:
Revealing key information about what will happen in a piece of entertainment to someone who wants to engage with it before they have had the chance to do so - whether intentionally or by mistake - “spoils” that piece of entertainment and diminishes their future experience.
Ruining someone’s future experience in this way is a form of harm to them.
Ruining someone’s future experience in this way is also unnecessary and avoidable.
To cause unnecessary harm to another person is to commit a moral wrong.
Therefore “spoiling” a piece of entertainment in this way is to commit a moral wrong.
Therefore a morally good person would avoid “spoiling” entertainment in this way.
While one might want to take issue with premise 2 - spoiling a movie is certainly not “harm” to the same extent that rape, murder, or robbery might be (and perhaps including it as such diminishes the severity of these other, far more important, moral wrongs) - for me it is on the first premise that I believe this argument truly has problems.
My parents met studying Shakespeare. I grew up in a household where the work of the Bard was routinely discussed and long before I ever saw any Shakespeare I had been given “spoilers” for many of his most famous plays, if not around the kitchen table at home, then in my English classroom at school. The first time I saw Macbeth I knew what the play was about even as I sat struggling to understand the words myself. Last year I watched my fourth production of it, my knowledge of the plot even deeper than that first time and my ears now fluent in the language. It was one of the best experiences at the theatre I have ever had despite my knowing in advance every twist and turn.
Less highbrow but no less relevant, before I had seen my first horror film I remember sitting on the playing fields at primary school and hearing the plots of every single Nightmare on Elm Street movie from a friend whose older brother had first told them to him. Far from spoiling the experience, when I was finally old enough to watch the Freddy Krueger movies on grainy VHS tape it only added more to the horror as I knew exactly what awful sight I was due to see next and sat there scared out of my mind in anticipation.
The idea that knowing what will happen in something inherently “spoils” it is undone with every modern “reboot” of an already well-loved franchise, every cinematic adaptation of a book we have already read, and every time we rewatch an old “classic” that once more takes our breath away. Never forget, one of the most successful movies of all time was Titanic - another three hour epic in which not a single person buying a ticket didn’t know before they took their seat that the ship would sink at the end.
And I would even go further. If telling you “whodunnit” ruins the whodunnit, or if telling you who does or doesn’t survive Endgame or Game of Thrones’ “Long Night” renders the previous hours of enjoyment in the series moot, then perhaps the thing you “spoiled” wasn’t “spoiled”, but instead just wasn’t very good in the first place?
Consider Sherlock Holmes, reboot after reboot we always know what will happen: Holmes will solve it, usually exactly the way he solved it in the book. Yet still we watch. Or my own personal favourite from days gone by: Columbo. The TV detective show so bold they “spoiled” it themselves by showing you “whodunnit” in the first ten minutes before expecting you to sit for a whole other hour to watch Columbo figure out what you already know. To know a secret or a surprise within a TV show, book, or movie certainly takes something away from the experience - that frisson of genuine surprise when the particular incident takes place - but is the lack of that frisson significant enough to “spoil” the entire experience? I would argue that it is not, because surprise and enjoyment are two distinct things. In fact, I can be deeply “surprised” when I watch something completely spoiler free and witness that which was completely unexpected…but that is no guarantee that what I saw was actually any good, or that I enjoyed the experience, even with the surprise. Returning to Titanic, if the director decided to “surprise” us all by making the ship stay afloat and everyone survive, I imagine the reviews would not have been so positive.
Therefore I present the following counter-argument:
Revealing key information about what will happen in a piece of entertainment - whether intentionally or by mistake - to someone who wants to engage with it before they have had the chance to do so will take away the element of surprise from some specific aspects of their future experience.
However, the element of surprise is not the sum total of what makes something entertaining and worth engaging with.
Furthermore, a mark of a piece of entertainment’s quality is often its longevity, with the better experiences of entertainment usually those experiences we want to have again and again.
If something can be “spoiled” and rendered ruined simply by revealing a single piece of information then it is perhaps an experience not worth having.
Being spared from such experiences would therefore be an act of kindness, rather than one of harm.
As quality entertainment can survive being “spoiled” and remain an enjoyable experience even without the element of surprise, and the only pieces of entertainment capable of being “spoiled” are ones not worth watching, then “spoiling” a piece of entertainment by revealing key information about what will happen in it before someone who wants to engage with it has a chance to do so “spoiler-free”, while potentially frustrating, unnecessary and avoidable, cannot be classified as “harmful” and therefore does not meet the criteria of something morally wrong, despite general social disapproval.
“Spoiling” Endgame or Game of Thrones does break agreed social conventions and demonstrate something unsavoury about your character. If done intentionally then you have still gone out of your way to upset someone and make them believe their fun has been ruined, even if, in fact it hasn’t been. You are not going to be anybody’s favourite person, and perhaps breaking social conventions may be a different kind of moral wrong in itself; one of which you are distinctly guilty. But having reflected on my two moral judgements, I do now perhaps concede that I was a little harsh in my concluding that the Year 10 students were “moral monsters” simply because they gave out a piece of information unknown to those in the class who had yet to see the film. As a teacher it is literally my job every day to give out information to my students that they do not yet know so that I can hopefully “spoil” their exam for them by making them well-prepared for it.
But then it struck me - the true reason many of us don’t like “spoilers” is the same reason that, as a teacher, I try not to simply spoon-feed my pupils the answers they seek and let them work things out for themselves. That sense of satisfaction a student feels when they put it all together and get it right.
The real thing that “spoilers” spoil is not the entertainment experience, but our experience of the games we play prior to that experience, where we theorise and speculate, by ourself or with others, about what might happen, could happen, or should happen in the show/ book/ movie/ comic we are eagerly awaiting. That sense of satisfaction at seeing you got it right, the smug disappointment at knowing your own ideas were better than what really happened, or that sense of delight at being outsmarted - the writers doing something you hadn’t dared to consider possible, despite your most diligent conjecture. That was the joy that gets taken away when someone reveals key information in advance: the joy of figuring things out for ourselves or getting stuck in a good mental challenge.
It is the equivalent of buying a lottery ticket and, just as you’re about to pay, the person you’re buying it from says: “you know these aren’t the right numbers for tonight’s draw? I’ve used a time machine and seen it. There’s a five missing. And a sixteen…” You didn’t think you’d actually win. You hadn’t chosen numbers for them to be correct. The fun was in the belief that you might, and that they could be. The salesperson just took away that fun by forcing us to confront the definitive truth and taking away the element of surprise from our speculation.
And here the lack of fun is significant because the fun here is the total experience and it does not survive being “spoiled”. While the piece of entertainment (if it is good) remains the same pre and post spoiler, the game of “what if” is killed dead the moment we know what actually happens.
Therefore, my argument now goes something like this:
While it may be true that:
Revealing key information about what will happen in a piece of entertainment - whether intentionally or by mistake, to someone who wants to engage with it before they have had the chance to do so may take away the element of surprise from some specific aspects of their future experience.
And the element of surprise is not the sum total of what makes something entertaining, with a mark of a piece of entertainment’s quality often being its longevity, with the better experiences of entertainment usually those experiences we want to have again and again.
And therefore quality entertainment can survive being “spoiled” and remain an enjoyable experience even without the element of surprise,
2) Revealing key information about what will happen in a piece of entertainment prior to it being enjoyed also takes away the element of surprise from all associated guessing games and speculation surrounding the piece of entertainment.
3) These games form an integral part of the wider experience of enjoyment surrounding the piece of entertainment.
4) Such games and speculation cannot survive exposure to this key information and therefore will be irredeemably ruined by “spoilers”.
5) Ruining such games constitute a form of avoidable and unnecessary harm.
6) To cause unnecessary harm to another person is to commit a moral wrong.
7) Therefore “spoiling” a piece of entertainment in this way is to commit a moral wrong
8) Therefore a morally good person would avoid “spoiling” entertainment in this way.
However, even this argument has its problems, as the whole idea of such games and speculation are predicated on the player eventually finding out the answer. What moral difference is there in them getting their answer two days early, in a classroom, rather than two days later in a cinema? Especially when it seems obvious that this same person would likely feel no sense of moral wrong-doing if, at the exact same moment, instead of spoiling the piece of entertainment for them a person, instead, whisked them away to sit and enjoy the entertainment earlier than expected. No one eager to see Endgame or Game of Thrones and sitting around excitedly speculating about it over the last six months would have felt any moral wrongdoing had occurred if an invitation had come to them in the mail to a special advance screening of the thing two months before anyone else in the world got to see it.
What really seems to be the issue here then, is the sense of autonomy surrounding when, exactly, we get exposed to the key information. As long as we choose to “spoil” the surprise for ourselves - either by engaging directly with the piece of entertainment or by searching for information online - then we feel ok about it. The moral wrong seems to stem from the violation of someone else making that decision for you. To have key information forced upon us without our consent ruining the surprise whether we want it ruined or not.
So perhaps my final argument is this:
The act of “spoiling” a piece of entertainment by revealing key information about it - whether intentionally or by mistake - to someone who wants to engage with it before they have had the chance to do so is not, in itself, morally wrong.
However, the act of forcing something unwanted on another person against their will is.
Therefore forcing information onto someone against their will - either intentionally or by mistake - even in the instance of something as trivial as information about a blockbuster movie constitutes a violation of their autonomy and freedom from such violations, and therefore constitutes a moral wrong.
Therefore “spoiling” a piece of entertainment in this way constitutes a moral wrong
Therefore a morally good person would avoid “spoiling” entertainment in this way.
So, in conclusion, those who “spoil” movies and TV shows for other people are moral monsters, just not for the reasons I thought they were at the time I made my initial judgement.
AUTHOR: D.McKee