Chuck Wendig said:
Also during infancy, I'm confronted with another baby who gets his face too close to mine. One of my options is to punch him. So, I think, "Screw it, I'm going to beat king hell out of this other baby," if only to see what the game does with that choice. The answer? Surprisingly, while my Gentleness stat goes down, my Physical stat goes up. I just got rewarded for playing Baby Fight Club.
And that's the ticket.
Yes, we
generally assume that punching a baby is wrong... but the game doesn't
tell you that, does it? The game simply provides you the reasonable outcomes of that behavior--you're less gentle, but you're stronger. It's up to
you to decide whether that's a good thing or not.
I'm put in the mind of comic books, and specifically those old "comic book pricing guides." "Super Duper Comics #1? That's worth $11-ty billion." There were even guidelines as to what constituted mint versus near mint condition. It always came back to a "Says who?" problem. Just like every kid learned when they went to a comic shop and tried to sell that "$100 comic." The price guide is bunk. Each person decides for themselves how much that particular comic is worth to them. If I'm not willing to pay you $100 for that issue, it's not worth $100 (to me).
In most games these days, that's how morality works. Somewhere in the game's story (and code) is a little pricing guide. It tells you that behavior X is worth Y positive (or negative) morality points
and it tells you that more morality points is
better. Often, we don't enjoy these systems because they leave us with a subconscious, "Says who?"
Players must be allowed (and even challenged) to assign their own value to actions. Rather than behavior X being worth
any amount of morality points, behavior X leads to outcome Y
and unintended consequence Z, to be revealed later. Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad. Maybe Y outweighs Z, maybe it doesn't. Maybe some people loved Y, while others hated it, and their opinions toward me reflect that... but maybe I'm okay with that trade-off, and I feel I've come out on top.
When we take the morality
out of the moral choice system, at least in the overly-direct way, we start to get into real choices. We can start crafting moral dilemmas. And unless both options are equally enticing, there's no "dilemma."
One good thing that
Fallout: New Vegas did is separate karma from reputation. Stealing things gave you bad karma... but you only lost reputation if you got caught by the people you were stealing from. And stealing
for another faction? Sure, it was negative karma, but it was
positive reputation for them. In a sense, morality is decided by whether or not what you did benefited a particular group. If it did, they could look the other way.
Morality had more than two options. You could be seen as a hero by one group, and a villain by another. And if you were heroic through villainous means (like stealing), some folks might mention the fact that you're a bit of a jerk... but they'll still work with you, without trusting you completely. The system could have gone a lot further with this, but it was already on the right track.
Alter Ego sounds like excellent study material for anyone looking into making a "choice-consequence" system, which is
far more meaningful than a "morality" system anyway.
