Good vs. Evil

[John Scott Tynes]

I think the key to the Luke-uses-evil-powers scenario is that it's a step on a path. The first few times he uses darkside Force powers, he'd have great reasons and justifications. But since those powers are so strong, the next time he's in a struggle he may turn to them right away because jeez, why not? Gradually, the swift use of deadly force becomes easier to use and to justify. One day he's the dictator of the galaxy.

This is one of the problems with the new prequel trilogy. Anakin makes sense as an impetuous, brash guy who finds the rules restricting who he loves a problem. When his mom is tortured by sandpeople and he flips out and kills them all, it's pretty understandable. The Sandpeople are consistently presented as "the other" -- you don't see sandpeople speeder mechanics knocking back a drink in the cantina with the humans. In his rage, his actions are understandable, if not necessarily justifiable.

Where I think the new movies went wrong (in this context) is how swiftly Anakin moves to murdering the Jedi kids. That's a really, really big step that I don't think is in any way reasonable for his character to take.

The KOTOR game seem more like Anakin and less like Luke. Which is a shame, because Luke has a much better story.

 

[John Scott Tynes]

I should add that you could model the good/evil Force powers thing the way I described mission content and the traits. The more you used the powers of either light or dark side, the cheaper those powers would get and the more expensive their counterparts would. So as a player, I could make a lot more darkside attacks than lightside once I start moving down that path. Moving back to the lightside would be a real effort ? you'd have fewer attacks, so the temptation would be really strong to stay on the darkside. But if you stick with it, eventually the darkside powers get expensive again and the lightside powers get cheap.

This general idea of taking the player's input and then using it to provide friction/no-friction gameplay in response is fun to play with.

 

[Geoffrey42]

To start, awesome. Love it.

With regards to the Act 3 reversals of course, in a western, I can imagine at least one pretty fantastic scripted reaction to your deciding to go from goody-two-shoes to evil-sidekick: as the sheriff, you have obviously fallen in love with and woo'd the school-marm/widowed-farmer's-wife/storeowner/hooker-with-a-golden-heart. After making your uber-evil reversal, there would be tears, and accusations of lies "just to get under my bustle". It would make no narrative sense to support multiple reversals though, so you'd probably want to build that into your mechanisms as a one-way-betrayal-of-trust.

On the subject of Star Wars, I'm going to go with Pedro and the author: using Anger for good intentions is just paving the path to hell in that universe.

 

[Schnippshly]

Yeah, Anakin killing the kids, although hilarious, was way too big a leap from rebellious goodguy to supervillain.

Personally I'm a little turned off by the whole turn this discussion has taken towards games with Star Wars force powers designated as good and evil. Maybe because I think force powers are ridiculous. If Jedi need training to move gigantic objects with the force, how come the average non-Jedi person can't move little things with the force, like a can of beer?

 

[Anachronism]

The whole point of The Dark Side corrupting you is exactly that though...

Go ahead, use Force Lightning to kill the Sith Lord...

It's soooo eaaaasy...

And he totally deserves it right...

Yes, use that power, strike him down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!

And the Luke/grip thing... using Grip to subdue is not evil, in fact one could argue that his use of force grip actually PREVENTED him having to kill them, hence making it a better thing to use. Grip hasn't been "evil" in canon for awhile, though killing someone with it still is, it's alot like strangling someone, it's just MEANER than shooting/slashing/stabbing them.

This is where the moral ambiguity of being a Grey would come in, though. You're right about Dark Side powers corrupting you, but only if they're used frequently. It's up to you how you use those powers, and whether or not you choose to use the Dark powers.

If a Jedi wasn't powerful enough to take down his enemy by normal means, but thought he could use the Dark Side abilities sparingly, without falling to the Dark side, who's to say he shouldn't? Ok, he might fall eventually, but it's up to him whether he continues to use those powers, or recognises the risk they pose and stops. If Luke had used Lightning against the Emperor in order to defeat him, but had managed to stop himself from completely giving himself over to the power the Dark Side offers, he would remain Light, despite having used Dark powers.

I suppose the basis of my argument is that evil means can be used to achieve a good end, but there is still a considerable risk in doing so.

 

[bioVOLTAGE]

The whole point to Luke in the Star Wars movies was to show that there was no Light or Dark, just people who were both. The Jedi and Sith both are extreams, and Luke was there to show that someone can be neutral. He can use is hate and anger in a constructive means, showing that they are not inherantly good or evil. It's like using a bomb to clear out a building site for a new building or sinking a ship for a new reef. The demolishing of a building or sinking of a ship by themselves are thought to be bad, but they're for the greater good.

Anyway, onto the main topic: The story could be interesting but there is one problem. You could get stuck in the first act if you keep doing one mission to cancel out another. By doing something bad in one mission, you would basicaly render something good you did right before invalid, until you run out of missions.

 

[Geoffrey42]

Anyway, onto the main topic: The story could be interesting but there is one problem. You could get stuck in the first act if you keep doing one mission to cancel out another. By doing something bad in one mission, you would basicaly render something good you did right before invalid, until you run out of missions.

While not covered in the original article (meaning I agree with the potential for the problem you point out), a solution I'd recommend is to have a second and third act with neutral possibilities. There are not an infinite number of 1-2 point missions, so eventually you'd run out, and the game would need to open up Act 2. Why not have the morally ambiguous path, where others react to you that way the author mentioned before, as a crazed psychopath with violent mood-swings.

 

[Schnippshly]

While not covered in the original article (meaning I agree with the potential for the problem you point out), a solution I'd recommend is to have a second and third act with neutral possibilities. There are not an infinite number of 1-2 point missions, so eventually you'd run out, and the game would need to open up Act 2. Why not have the morally ambiguous path, where others react to you that way the author mentioned before, as a crazed psychopath with violent mood-swings.

Someone who has crazy mood swings wouldn't go from rescuing children from a burning orphanage to burning down an orphanage in an attempt to kill all of the children inside, though.

 

[Smokescreen]

Sigh.

The article accurately articulates the problem with games that give you a moral choice, and then in its proposed solution promptly falls into the exact same problem.

You can either /help/ the evil cattle baron, or you can work /against/ the evil cattle baron.

It doesn't matter that there are 4 traits that give those endings nuance, and that there's a sudden twist at the end is kind of a betrayal of...well everything the story would be about (unless you REALLY worked at setting it up, because for the most part assassins don't suddenly turn on their masters in the name of good, nor good people suddenly shit on their principles in the name of a power grab).

To truly have a game where one can make choices that have an impact on the result, you need to have a game that has more than two results. This might mean working with the Devil in certain cases, and it might mean standing up him in others, with that kind of uneasy tension in between, but there has to be benefits and costs to EACH path that are unique to them and worth having.

In that case, why not try this fascinating game known as life?
/snark

Really though; the technology and work that it would take to do such a thing might just be beyond what any reasonable group could accomplish in a lifetime.

 

[iggyus]

Try the Witcher if you want serious moral dillemas and consequences

 

[Jumplion]

Sigh.

The article accurately articulates the problem with games that give you a moral choice, and then in its proposed solution promptly falls into the exact same problem.

You can either /help/ the evil cattle baron, or you can work /against/ the evil cattle baron.

It doesn't matter that there are 4 traits that give those endings nuance, and that there's a sudden twist at the end is kind of a betrayal of...well everything the story would be about (unless you REALLY worked at setting it up, because for the most part assassins don't suddenly turn on their masters in the name of good, nor good people suddenly shit on their principles in the name of a power grab).

To truly have a game where one can make choices that have an impact on the result, you need to have a game that has more than two results. This might mean working with the Devil in certain cases, and it might mean standing up him in others, with that kind of uneasy tension in between, but there has to be benefits and costs to EACH path that are unique to them and worth having.

In that case, why not try this fascinating game known as life?
/snark

Really though; the technology and work that it would take to do such a thing might just be beyond what any reasonable group could accomplish in a lifetime.

I agree with you, this article doesn't find a solution to this problem, all it does is disguise it into something else.

A while ago I made my own article [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forum/read/9.85219] about choices and good and evil in gaming.

If we want to give players a moral delima, and not have to reuse the whole Karma system where you're "Goody-two-shoes" or "Bastardly-Dastardly Evil dude" then we have to have choices where there is no good or bad choice.

Heavy Rain [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Rain] demonstrates this perfectly. When you enter the house, do you go in the front door, the back, do you break in a window, ring the doorbell? What about checking the fridge first, or hurry up and look at the cabinet, or take your time to observe everything? There are a bunch of choices in Heavy Rain, but none of them are "good" to do or "bad" to do. They're all choices and each have their own impact on the game.

(Assuming Heavy Rain does what it promises) That is how we should implement morality into gaming. Don't give us two or three choices, one "good", "bad", and "neutral". Give us a bunch of choices that seem to have no meaning but each have their own impact. It won't be easy, but who said it would be?

 

[Elf Defiler Korgan]

Great ideas John. How games with complicated stories should be made.

Perhaps when each decision comes into play the choices emerge above the character, and the world is temporarily greyed out, slowed. Now based on your alignment, you might be pulled towards one, I literally mean the cursor is pulled towards the decision, say a box imagining the outcome (the picnicers are massacred stylistically). If you want to wrestle with yourself, and fight your new self, that has to be done with the controller or mouse. Think trying to get up from a k.o in a boxing game. Later on in the game if you go evil, neutral or somewhat helpful choices are still there, but the purely good or most morally superior and uncontaminated goodness becomes completely unavailable, and the player can see this. Except at the end, final scene, where if the player chooses the non-psychopathic ending, the player is treated to a little scene of the character remembering all the evil he has done, all the mail not delivered, his sleeping on the job, letting a rapist go, people not helped from robbers or thieves, all the glassy eyes of the innocents left to die in puddles of their own blood as the sun set because the boss hinted not to be involved. Realising all this, the character has a brief traumatic moment, sets his jaw, and says no. Perhaps to the amusing laugh and condemnation of fellow criminal actors.

That is the type of game I would like to play.

 

[fladvad]

Very good article with an interesting premises for a rpg-esque game. I was thinking during the read how only removing some choices in missions could make you lean more towards a path. Much like how your character build in the original fallouts restricted how intelligent your conversations where and how prone to violence you where. So in the beginning you could have all the choices, but the more you leaned towards a path the less chances you'd have to change your path. I agree that is more interesting with missions tailor made for your selfishness, vanity, rightousness etc., but it might be straining the studios budget too much to make them all.
Also agree with above posters, I'd love to play the sheriff-game. Why don't you pitch it?

 

[Ledan]

Hmmm,
If I were to create a game like that in a simple program... would you allow it?
(e.g. Flash, when I get the hang of it...)

 

[The_Amaster]

I read this, and I think of a game that got right what Bioshock got wrong. The game I'm talking about is almost exactly what this article was describing. There's an indie RPG called Geneforge from like, 2002, with a very similar concept to Bioshock.
In the game, (and it's sequels), there exist mysterious "canisters', glass cylinders filled with magic goo that rewrites your genetic code and gives you special abilities. (Remember, this was before Bioshock)
But while in Bioshock, it's a very clear choice; kill the Little Sisters and extract Adam, or let them live, and the two endings reflect this extreme dichtomy, in Geneforge the effect is much more subtle. The Canisters are invaluable in granting you abilities, your spells and creations (mutant monster party characters) almost all derive from them. But slowly, over the course of the game, you'll notice a change in your interactions with NPCs. Where before you were totally free to be either cruel or kind in your interactions, slowly your characters patience begins to erode with those he perceives as "lesser beings". You are quicker to anger, which gets you into fights you might otherwise avoid. other people who see you can tell that you've used the canisters, and it turns them against you, making them less likely to ally with you. And so it becomes a balancing act; how much power is worth it, and how much are you willing to trade for these wonderful abilities?
It's a much more natural and believable transformation that that offered by just about any game today, where the choices usually seem to be more like this. [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/3/27/]
And I haven't even touched on the regular choices you make in dialogue and such, because it's almost never clear who's good and whose bad, or even if anyone is really evil or just driven by their beliefs. It's never obvious which choice is "bad" or "good", because everyone has good reasons why they're right.
This is a template that game devs need to follow. Organic, believable characters, with foils and beliefs. A player shouldn't make a choice because he knows it will make him "good" or "evil", but rather because he believes in the path he's taking.

 

[anaphysik]

If Jedi need training to move gigantic objects with the force, how come the average non-Jedi person can't move little things with the force, like a can of beer?

"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not."

 

[Otterpoet]

An excellent editorial on what I believe to be a serious lacking in most games video. This is exactly what bothered me so much about KOTOR. While I loved the game, I felt the choices were so diametrically opposed that you really couldn't follow anything but a singular path: be it Light or Dark. And it's not even a true path. You can either be saint or a complete a$$hole. Where are the gray areas that a character would come up against?

Apparently the upcoming InFamous has a morality system to it. For example, during an airdrop of food & medicine, you can defend it and distribute it to the starving people. . . or you can take it for yourself and give it to your friends, one of who is quite ill and needs it badly. That is a clear morality play... save complete strangers or the people you love. How the game play is actually affected by your choices, I'm not sure... but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for something beyond the Good vs Evil scale that dominate games these days.

 

[For Science]

I would like to see a game with (lets say 3 prudence comparison & justice) virtues (and maybe something else independent of the virtues. Maybe flaws or outlooks) so you have to pick your right answer, not the games.
EDIT: I have high hopes for this series.

 

[Phantom Sheep]

I've discussed this issue with my threads a whole lot. I really liked this article. I think the most important problem about good/evil gameplay you touched on, and that was the idea of a magnetic path. It always bothered me that say, in KOTOR, I could play as the killingest dickwad in the world, but right before the end still have the option to make the "good" choice. When you make certain choices, your access to certain avenues need to be cut-off.

 

[bsharp32]

What a great read.