Weekend Recovery: On Morality In Video Games
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It seems that any game coming out these days touts "moral ambiguity" as a selling point. Plastered all over the advertising of Bioware's upcoming RPG Dragon Age: Origins, for example, is reference to the game's "complex moral choices." It remains to be seen whether or not the implementation here will be different than recent releases, but I usually find the concept of "moral ambiguity" to be pretty meh in practice.
This has come up here in the past. When put into play, morality in video games tends to fall into two very distinct camps: an action has two very clear options, either the stereotypical good choice or the stereotypical bad one. The way these choices are presented usually have no ambiguity whatsoever-- it's obvious which is the "good" decision and which is the "bad." Bioshock has been heavily praised for these, but the only moral decision you make the entire course of the game is whether or not you use the looks-like-children-but-aren't-really-children Little Sisters as a resource to improve your combat viability. While the game gives you a frowny-face ending if you harvest all the Little Sisters, it ultimately has no effect on the game whatsoever.
Fallout 3 was another recent title that portrayed this as a feature of the game. While the choices you made as you progressed through the game weren't limited to a single decision, they were just as irrelevant to your overall progression whether you went the good or evil route. One quest chain in particular, the Roy Phillips/Tenpenny Tower quest, was such a glaring example of this irrelevancy that the first time I went through it I actually thought my game had bugged out and defaulted me to the evil outcome accidentally. There is a superficial implementation of "punishment" in Fallout 3 whether your karma sways too far in either direction, but you get an equally strong faction coming after you regardless of your character's constitution.
Sometimes "morality" is irrelevant, but other times it's outright ridiculous. As you play through Fable you're given moral choices but as the overall goal of the game is to stop a Super Bad Guy, it starts to raise the question of why a heroic asshole is doing all these "good" things. At one point you're given a choice between sparing or killing your rival at ye olde hero school, but it doesn't matter which route you choose. If you spare her you get a golf clap, but she doesn't do anything for you to any tangible degree for the rest of the game. Similarly, you can kill her, but you don't get kicked out of the heroes guild for doing it.
It's pretty obvious why moral choices are put together so badly in games-- it would be a lot of work to do well. To say nothing of the programming challenges with implementing so many branching options, the writing itself would be monumentally complicated to account for. It's also a challenge of creating an overall plot that makes sense whether you play good or evil; why would an evil character have a vested interest in stopping the big bad demonic half-god the same way the good player is, after all? Still, when the usual implementation is so half-assed I often just wish developers didn't even bother. I'd rather a linear progression than the presentation of superficial morality that has no effect on the game itself. It would be interesting for an RPG to let you play as an evil badass, but actually penalizes you for doing it: if the over-arcing goal of the game is to defeat a big bad evil, maybe if you begin to resemble too much of what you're fighting, other morally-good characters will stop having anything to do with you for the duration of the game, leaving you more on your own to come up with solutions. Similarly, perhaps there's some sort of super weapon that you can destroy or utilize, and the good character who tosses it away has a tougher time of things because of that choice. Games seem to want to ensure that the experience is the same whether you play good or evil and seem afraid to punish someone for going one way or the other-- but why provide a choice if the choice is meaningless?
I do have high hopes for Dragon Age: Origins, though. Bioware is often championed for their nuanced storylines and well-thought out plots, and Mass Effect had one of the better "morality" implementations that I've seen. People in real life are typically not stereotypically one-sided archetypes of light and darkness; we're all grey, and it would be nice to see games that start to take advantage of that reality and have the bravery to provide repercussions for people who go to either side of the good/bad spectrum.
How do you guys feel about it? Would you rather games lose their choice-driven consciences entirely, or do you have better examples of ones that got it right?
mixvio
Posted to Miscellany on 26 October 2009
· Comments (7)
Other stuff like this: bioware, choices, dragon age origins, fable, fallout 3, mass effect, morality, weekend recovery
I so totally agree with you on this. I'm so sick of games that "allow you to be whatever you choose to be" forcing you to pick one way or the other for every choice along the way!
Though with your point about why an evil character would want to defeat the big bad, the big bads are often world destroying bad and thus self preservation would come in to play.
The only game I can think of with significant good/evil consequences on gameplay is Ultima Online. Being evil had large advantages (getting stuff is a lot easier when you just take it) but becoming a criminal meant you had no access to towns without dying (besides the red town). Though that game was an MMO and had very very little plot.
Yeah I can see character evolution for an evil player by kicking the ass of the Big Bad and then taking whatever toys or objectives said Big Bad was trying to get, but for themselves. It would make sense for an evil character to go "Now that I've stopped the evil demon from getting the Sword of Horror and taking over the world, I think I'll finish what it couldn't and proclaim myself emperor."
But if you don't want to be forced between the dichotomy of super good or super evil, you're pretty much out of luck. And even if you do pick one or the other, it's pretty irrelevant either way. If you play as a super bad character you're rarely limited from anything, similarly with the super good characters.
I'm looking forward to Heavy Rain to see how moral ambiguity is handled.
Ultima 7 had an entertaining take on Morality. If you did bad things your party would eventually abandon you and the police would kill you. But on the other hand, if you did nice things (rescue babies, solve crimes etc) people just said "thanks" and you got no reward beyond the warm satisfaction of having taken time out to save a fictional baby.
People should give the industry time to evolve.
It wasn't that long ago (relatively) that you didn't have a choice at all aside from being a do-gooder.
Now tons of games cater to those who like to play evil instead of good. It might not be perfect yet, but at least we've gotten the choice.
It only stands to reason that the industry will take note of people's desire for more ambiguity and evolve even further.
Until artificial intelligence gets more complex, or more writers are thrown at this problem things probably wont change much.
inFamous kinda bugged me like that. Good vs. Evil actions change your appearance and what powers you get at least, but the story doesn't really change based on your actions. Certain people still die no matter what you choose. If I'm not mistaken though, taking the final Evil action DOES give you more powers than you would being good and drastically changes your appearance even more, and the ending shows you reveling in your power and planning on using it to dominate the city. So that was a neat touch.
I think that my ideal morality system would focus on the NPCs and their reactions rather than the player character. "Good" and "bad" are often very subjective things, so it would make sense for each NPC to have their own perception stat for what they think of you. Fable 2 started to play with this idea, but it was easily exploitable since you could see the NPC stat, and was ineffective since all of the NPCs were soul-less shells of people. It's important that the player cannot see an NPC's perception status so that the player needs to actually invest the time to have a conversation or perform some action for the NPC.
I also don't think that NPCs should be aware of your actions if you don't perform them within their field of vision. If I'm being evil and stealthily killing people, then I wouldn't expect that to impact an NPC's perception of me since they are unaware that I am doing it. Likewise, if I go to a new town, then the residents of that town shouldn't necessarily be aware of my previous actions.
To balance it out, I do think that the player should still have good and evil statistics, though perhaps they should be split up into individual stats rather than a sliding bar between the two. Since a character can be evil without NPCs knowing, maybe dialog options could be limited by your alignment, making it harder to hide your character's true nature, though still possible to hide it for those that are skilled enough at deception. Maybe if the people you are secretly killing are bad people then you gain both good and evil points, rather than having your alignment shift slightly in one direction or the other.
Of course, this idea would take up a lot of AI memory and be very difficult to program properly, so I don't expect to see anything like this until the next generation of systems with more system memory.