308: First Kisses (And Deaths-By-Molester)

[TheMarkedOne]

Just played for 2 hours straight.

Died trying to catch a ball, with a smile on my face

That was amazing.

You too? Ugh I so regret choosing that option, well at least I catched it <_<

A healthy life without any serious troubles and then I die playing baseball when of old age
Hmm, maybe I should have taken the hint when both my parents died during my young adulthood.

It was a fun game to try out

 

[Ben Jackson]

Alter ego is completely free and you don't even need to sign up. Although you need a account to save. Here's the link:
http://www.playalterego.com

I got to the elder stage in my life. I then joined a baseball team called "the senior sluggers".
I caught a ball...then blacked out and died...

 

[Sleepingzombie]

I played from birth to elderdom and had a great time. I managed to get a hundred on most scores but 50 on happyness and no relationships worked out.

Great game and I wonder how similiar my own life will be, I am 19.

 

[saintchristopher]

Wow, did ANYONE manage a successful relationship?? I got abandoned at the altar twice. I actually wanted to cry at the end of the game.

Why, Antoinette... why?

 

[MajoraPersona]

First Kisses (And Deaths-By-Molester)

Good stories live in the complexities and corollaries born of more nuanced moral choices. Sometimes, you just have to get in the car with the child molester.

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I helped catch the child molester, saved at least two lives, got married and had a step-son, got on the baseball team in my youth, and died catching a ball in the outfield.

Life is wonderful.

Alter ego is completely free and you don't even need to sign up. Although you need a account to save. Here's the link:
http://www.playalterego.com

I got to the elder stage in my life. I then joined a baseball team called "the senior sluggers".
I caught a ball...then blacked out and died...

Was it in the Outfield, or was I doomed from the start?

I believe the problem with morality systems in games these days is that they are taking place in a sphere where the risks are too high. When stakes are up and the chips are down, you really only have three options: You can be a paragon, you can be a dick, or you can be a chump.

The reason Alter Ego is able to pull off a "shades-of-gray" morality system is because your character isn't tasked with saving the world or doing secret missions or anything like that. The only thing your character is tasked with doing is living his/her own life as best (s)he could.

I saved a friend from committing suicide (or ruined his death, if you prefer), and while getting on in years, saved a drowning kid by jumping in after him and swimming for him. And yet it was the baseball that did me in. Go figure.

 

[BrainWalker]

Aside from being impressively detailed, this game is also well-written, and hilarious. I'm not even out of diapers and I've already giggled several times.

 

[beniki]

The answer as to why modern games can't do this kind of stuff is development costs.

In Alter Ego, the outcomes are represented by a few lines of text. You can write as many outcomes as you want for that in the space of ten minutes, and the stat following is as easy as setting up an Excel spreadsheet.

Put that into something like Mass Effect though, and you have a weeks worth of work rendering just one outcome, another week to get the voice acting done, and then another week to fix all the damn bugs that pop up. And that's just for one outcome and choice.

The simpler your graphical design, the easier it is to create variety and foster spontaneous reactions from creators. The higher the fidelity, the more things need to be planned in advance, and the bigger your production crews, the simpler the over riding message needs to be so every one knows what they're doing.

I'm not arguing against better graphics. On the contrary, I think we still haven't quite reached the full potential of them in games to represent emotion. It'll be better once we get more flexible ways to code and create graphics.

 

[Gralian]

Firstly, from what i read Alter Ego still falls into a similar trap of today's moral choices; the reliance on stats and stat changing. Using your example of cheating on your wife, why would your trustworthiness automatically go down? Because you feel guilty about cheating and it radiates from your very being? The most trustworthy people in the world can also turn out to be right snakes. Likewise, why should you be denied an option because your stat doesn't quite "match up" to the requirement? Why should other NPCs be psychic for the sake of story contrivance just to give consequence to your stat changes? That bugs me just as much as "You need to be 25% more good / evil to perform this action or select this dialogue."

Secondly, the reason modern RPGs have such lackluster moral choices is because often there is an event just waiting to happen, literally bursting at the seams, but require input from the player on how that event will unfold literally seconds before it explodes in your face. Do you stop the robber or help him escape? Answer quickly, because the cops are seconds behind you!

The times moral choices really work are when the consequences for those choices are not immediate. The Witcher did this extremely well. There was no quick-loading safety net. Any choices you made were stuck with you, and as a result, you were never entirely sure which was the "right" choice to make. Take the earliest choice for example, you happen across some freedom fighters while on a job and they want to take your crates. Do you let them? If you do, several hours later you'll find a mission critical NPC dead in the next chapter. If you don't another mission critical NPC goes to jail. These are very heavy consequences, but because it occurs much later than the decision making process, it has far more weight and ambiguity to the decision making itself. Mass Effect, for all its shortcomings, has also succeeded here. While a lot of the decisions are asininely "you are orphan-hugging good or puppy-kicking evil" obvious, there are a few exceptional stand-out moments in ME2 with very ambiguous moral choices and consequences. I'm talking about choosing whether to end or continue the genophage, whether to reprogram or wipe out a large number of sentient robots, whether to support a war to reclaim a planet. Big, world-changing decisions that do not actually impact the world until many, many hours later. Into the next game, in fact. I spent well up to half an hour pondering some of those moral dilemmas and i could no longer just rely on the "moral compass" at the bottom for guidance on what was best. It's not because of the gravity of these choices that made them so genius, but the gravity brought on by the denial to see the consequences of these choices immediately.

 

[Daniel_Rosamilia]

I just played through the whole thing, and it's very certainly an interesting game.
Dome of the options gave answers I wasn't expecting, and the ending where you pass away of old age is quite moving.
Activision certainly made a brilliant game with this one.

 

[Grahav]

Playing the alter ego and loving it.

Stupid pedo was sent to jail. Ha, Ha!

 

[ineedscissors]

I highly recommend taking the time to experience Alter Ego, it was both enjoyable and surprisingly emotional.

Myself, I was a doctor who married his college girlfriend and was never unfaithful (even though she was kind of annoying), I had a son named John, I was respected as a community activist, and I died peacefully of old age.

 

[kingpocky]

What's the meaning of the license plate being OBO-237? I googled it, but the only thing I could find was references to the game itself with people saying how obvious it is, and no one saying why.

 

[Hiroshi Mishima]

I'm glad that a few people, instead of almost mindlessly praising the game for being so good, pointed out that it really suffered in a number of rather obvious ways.

Why should cheating on your wife cause you to become less trustworthy? If I've been good all my life, wouldn't it be perfectly reasonable to assume that I might harbor a darker or more sinful side? If I'm a saint, does that mean I can't do my partner in the bum?

I also liked what someone said about the stranger in the car, you either choose the wrong response or the right one.. there's really no middle ground.

If I'm a rebellious youngster, why can't I be a stable and congenial person as I grow up? We learn from our mistakes after all, don't we?

I dunno.. maybe it's cause the moment I read the article the seed of doubt was planted into my mind, since I know all about shades of grey and what it can (or can't) mean in the development of a character. I also agree with a lot of what's been said about why such a system is difficult to implement into modern gaming.

Actually, unlike an earlier poster, I DO feel that the current state of graphics limits what we're capable of doing for the sheer fact that it'd take far longer (and apparently more money) to make a game bigger if it looks fancier than a game that looks like it was made 5 years ago, 7 if you're being conservative. Despite their length today, I actually feel many RPGs are shorter than their 2-D ancestors because so much of the "content" in today's games have little to do with the overall plot and more to do with easy to program sidequests involving finding/collecting items, talking to an NPC that may or may not have been there all along (and hoping they're not dead in some games), and of course the touted moral choice system itself.

I mean, if you're going to have two kinds of reactions to any given situation, you've essentially forced yourself to cut the game in half so you'll have enough time/room to provide Good AND Evil outcomes for most of the game's scenarios.


Honestly, I think what kind of bothers me the most about Alter Ego is that I can't do things how I might want to. I mean, if we're going to live some sort of fantasy/imagined alternate life.. why can't we live it as ordinarily or extraordinarily as we'd like? Obviously because they couldn't think of all the situations and/or the programming was limited. But that doesn't change the fact I'd probably be unlikely to BECOME the stranger in the car, if I made the right choices, because presenting the player with a sticky situation (that at first seems harmless) is a lot less morally questionable than having the player be the cause of that situation.

Not that I'm advocating either murder or pedophilia, but if you're going to give us the wide range of options and choices as the game supposedly does, it just seems kinda odd to conveniently leave out those more frowned upon. Unless the game actually does allow you to become that bad, which would genuinely surprise me. In all honestly, it'd probably provide you with so many penalties you'd never be able to get a "happy" ending for your character if you've done a lotta bad things. No matter what some books and movies would have you think.

Still, I may give it a whirl someday.