Congratulations on your first article here, I loved it. It was food for thought. Never thought of Paperboy in that light before, I suppose it really was an early morality system of sorts. A clean effective one at that, without the "moral alignment" bars/graphs of later games that I came to loathe. A very personal system too, you did the action and saw the immediate consequence while riding away from the "scene of the crime" so to speak and only had to attend to your own conscience or lack of it in regards to the pixely human lives you so recklessly altered in your mad dash to deliver yesterday's news.
The Mass Effect take on it, in which you chose if you wanted to be a gun-toting version of Batman or Superman and it was preferred if you didn't waffle too much between the two courses of action which ultimately differed mostly in the amount of sass applied in performing the task, posed the question "do the ends justify the means?" but in a mostly inconsequential way and when it did matter you were graded on it and scolded for being a bad boy. I didn't care much for it and other very similar applications of the concept.
Now Dragon Age: Inquisition does it well, I think, you make your own choices and judge yourself on them (there's no one telling you if they're red or blue or various shades of grey) but other people have their own morality system which they'll weigh up your actions against and they may view you in a new light if you continually take actions they disagree with in your quest to save the land. You're not alone on your bike distributing the paper, you're the leader of an unchecked, unregulated organization that aims to wrangle away power from the current institutional holders and with that comes a more thorough analysis of your choices by your allies. How far we've come! And yet, can the Herald of Andraste throw a newspaper at a random peasant and ride away on his trusty mount? Not bloody likely!
I like articles that get me thinking about game mechanics in a new light and this one certainly did. Forgive me for running a bit long with the comment.
