Demon’s Souls

After reading about how old-school punishing this game is….I was deeply intrigued especially when I read an article (http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3172516) detailing a 3 point gap (9 to 6) between two of Famitsu’s reviewers where the quotes that Nick Des Barres points out - the reviewer on the low end simply complains about inaccessibility and difficulty where as the other reviewer finds it to hearken straight from the retro days and to be extremely rewarding…”The basis of this game is trial and error… the lack of checkpoints in the stages is punishing,” wrote Leona Ebihara, while Sugashi Kawada said, “Since death means the end in this game, I might compare it to an expert chess problem.”   After reading that I find myself greatly amused as it has become so commonplace in games these days for ‘death’ to not mean ‘game over’ or ‘the end’ to a point where you can even say that “death means the end in this game” as death is no longer an end in games.

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“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. Read more