“Morality” and storylines driven by players’ choices have seemingly become all the rage in videogames these days. A convention that used to be limited to, traditionally, the realm of western RPGs (Bioware’s Baldur’s Gate series were my first exposure to the idea of being “good or evil” in my young gaming career), with the continual bleeding together of genres you will probably find yourself confronted with moral choices in Unreal Tournament 2k10. However, the novelty of “moral choices” is quickly wearing off, as, with most innovations, the industry’s trend for “me-too” has lead to a lot of cut-and-dry, simplistic renditions of morality. So, for the first edition of a new series of posts called “Thinking About Games,” I’d like to explore the problem of morality in games. What’s being done right, what’s being done wrong, and what could lead to innovations for its usage in games?

Two warnings before the jump: First of all, since I’ll be talking about specific instances of games, there will be spoilers (sometimes major) within this post. I’ll be sure to introduce the game I’m speaking of before throwing out plot points, but be aware that even recent games (such as inFAMOUS) are fair game here. Last, but not least: tl;dr.

Let’s start large-scale, here. The first, and biggest, issue I see with the way morality is currently portrayed in games has to do with the way it seems most game designers view morality. Most games with moral choices view good and evil in very plain and stereotypical ways. “Good” choices include granted forgiveness to people who have wrong you, self-sacrifice, selflessness, and genoristy; “evil” choices involve revenge, a disregard for the well-being of others, hubris, and avarice. This is a very idealized way to look at wrong and right, and this narrow-minded view forces everything around it to remain simplistic.
Let’s take a look at inFAMOUS, for example. As the main character Cole, one of your ultimate goals is to find the Ray-Sphere, a horrific doomsday device that leads to a giant explosion, killing everyone in its wake but giving its activator the super-power of controlling electricity (for the unaware, inFAMOUS starts with Cole being tricked into activating the Sphere and thus gaining super powers). During your quest, you are confronted with many choices in the game which lead to you gaining good or bad “karma”. Each of these choices are framed by a mini-cutscene that actually TELLS YOU which action is good or bad—as if they weren’t already obvious. However, the game’s final choice should be a lot more deep than this simple “good or bad” labeling. When you finally recover the Ray Sphere, Cole can opt to activate the sphere and gain more powers at the expense of killing others (evil choice), or he chooses to destroy it so it can never be unleahsed on innocents again (good choice). However, after the game’s final boss fight with the antagonist, Kessler, we are basically told that the BEST choice for the player to have made, in terms of what is best for the universe of inFAMOUS, was the evil choice. As the game explains, Kessler is actually Cole from the future. He failed to protect people from some unnamed villain, and traveled back in time to forge Cole into a leaner, meaner fighting machine. Activating the Ray Sphere a second time would have actually made Cole more empowered to deal with whatever upcoming threat will face humanity; so, should it really be the evil choice? Of course, Cole doesn’t know all of this at the time, so in that moment it is the more evil action. However, by game designers lazily falling into these stereotypical roles and labels, it opens up situations like this where it is extremely easy to poke holes in the game mechanics, making the story and game feel shallow and cheap, and by extension, less immersive.

Which brings us to our second pitfall in a lot of moral choices: immersion and connection. In order for moral choices to really bear any sort of weight on the player, you as a gamer have to feel a connection to the game’s world and some sort of emotional attachment or some sort of connection to those who inhabit it. Otherwise, the choices become meaningless, with the player just picking what is labeled the good, bad, or neutral choice in order to maintain their karma rating (and to get achievements!). The best (worst?) example of a game that utterly fails at this is Fable 2. I’ve already lambasted the game in a previous post, so I’ll keep things short here. The whole game presents Albion’s citizenry not as realistic, fleshed out people, but instead treats them almost as a mini-game. You don’t get attached to these people at all; you are instead trained to think of them as item dispensors that you just repeat canned emotions to over and over, or mere tools to use for the sake of achievements. If you get married, you don’t know ANYTHING about your spouse other than their social standing and that they like when you flirt with them, but not when you fart. So, by the time you get to the end choice of the game (save millions of citizens who were killed by the big bad villain, ressurect your dog who, for the whole game, has been a critical and vital gameplay mechanic, or make lots of money which pretty much rains from the sky anyway in Fable 2), unless you are specifically making that choice in order to get achievement points, you have no emotional reasons to feel guilty about NOT saving these people, and futhermore, from a gameplay perspective, if you choose to save those people you’re gimping your character! If morality in games is to evolve, so, too, do gameplay mechanics and script writers. If you want me to actually feel conflicted about the lives of many versus the lives of one, make those “many” seem like actual, realistic people, not just mindless NPC drones.
The last problem with moral choices is something that is kind of hard to fix in a traditional game, and that’s saving. Yes, saving the game is probably the biggest hurdle to cross when it comes to moral choices in games. Because, as it stands, no moral choice is final; if you make a choice you think is good, and it turns out in the long run to be evil, well, you can just reload your last quicksave and get a do-over. This, in essence, makes all your choices moot, because you can manipulate the timeline of the game and erase anything you’ve done. Of course, if you took this out of a game, well, a lot of people (myself included) would be kind of annoyed. After all, if you took out the ability to replay a game, well, you would see your game in a lot of GameFly queues but not in a lot of NPD reports. Furthermore, not allowing a gamer to save anywhere in a game, ESPECIALLY in an RPG, is a big no-no. The only space, in my opinion, where you could really tackle this problem would be in an MMO, like what Bioware seems to be doing in their Old Republic MMORPG. They claim that the choices you make will affect the universe; so, if you’re a sith and choose to kill a ship captain, that dude is gone from the universe. Since all data is stored server-side, there would be no do-overs; what’s done is done. Of course, the game is probably years away, so we’ll see what the actual retail product brings to the table.
Of course, the biggest problem facing most game developers isn’t one of the three listed above; it’s current technology and industry expectations. I’m sure Peter Molyneux would love to have a team large enough to code a backstory for every single person in Albion, a storage medium to store all that info on, and the finances in order to work on a humongous project like that for years and years. However, as things stand now, that’s pretty much impossible. There’s no way you could cram that much info onto a DVD (or a Blu-Ray, for that matter), or enough bandwidth for the average consumer to download that much stuff via digital distribution. I’m sure the best and brightest minds are currently thinking about how to deal with these problems themselves, right now, as soon as there is ample technology and finances. And, of course, these problems don’t stop games with morality as a central component to being fun. Some of my favorite current games – Mass Effect, Fallout 3, inFAMOUS, etc – all have these problems I talked about, but are still fun as hell to play. The average gamer probably isn’t going to approach these problems that way I want to, or even think about it; at the end of the day, games are still meant to be fun. It will be interesting to see how morality-based games continue to evolve, while trying to maintain the core tenent of entertainment.