Making the "Right" Choice in Paperboy and Beyond

Lizzy Finnegan

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Mar 11, 2015
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Making the "Right" Choice in Paperboy and Beyond

Freedom of choice in games has been around for awhile, but one of the pioneers was a game set in suburbia and followed a little boy on a bicycle.

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Aerith

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Feb 25, 2015
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Interesting article, for sure. And it strikes me as odd that a game like Paperboy manages to portray moral choices better than, let's say BioShock or Infamous.
 

GiantRedButton

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Sometimes choices are better when not affecting the game that much.
In the first Mass Effect game you needed either a high Paragon or Renagade Score to pass certain tests like keeping Wrex.
The result was that playing anything but entirly paragon or entirly renegade was gimping your character.
The endresult was that Mass Effect only had a single choice instead of many.
Will you be Paragon or Renagade?
And that choice is made at the beginning.

The Witcher games do it much better in my opinion.
 

Demetirus

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Grats on the first article, Lizzy! Incidentally, I wonder what it says about me if I just made it a point to try and nail everyone and everything with a newspaper just because I could and doing so made me laugh gleefully?

Some paperboys just want to watch the world burn?
 

Pinkilicious

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GiantRedButton said:
Sometimes choices are better when not affecting the game that much.
In the first Mass Effect game you needed either a high Paragon or Renagade Score to pass certain tests like keeping Wrex.
The result was that playing anything but entirly paragon or entirely renegade was gimping your character.
The endresult was that Mass Effect only had a single choice instead of many.
Will you be Paragon or Renagade?
And that choice is made at the beginning.

The Witcher games do it much better in my opinion.
This has always been the thing I disliked most about Bioware games, black-or-white choices. Like the whole Rachni thing. Genocide them, or possibly cause someone else's genocide in the future by the queen's children?
There's no option to hand her over to a crazed etymologist for study whom winds up eliminating their innate territorialness, and if you choose to destroy the queen, the game browbeats the hell out of you for choosing to do so.
Nearly a quarter of the choices in the game tell you you are definitively WRONG for having chosen that way. That's not a choice if you present it that way!!! And you're heavily penalised if the browbeating succeeds, in some cases, because you fall too far off 'paragon' or 'renegade.' If you're gonna imply there's only one 'choice' then DON'T PENALISE THE PLAYER FOR MAKING THAT CHOICE

Demetirus said:
Grats on the first article, Lizzy! Incidentally, I wonder what it says about me if I just made it a point to try and nail everyone and everything with a newspaper just because I could and doing so made me laugh gleefully?

Some paperboys just want to watch the world burn?
I liked to use the game genie to get unlimited papers and just set my Zipper to autofire! Machinegun!
http://www.8bitnes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/-31563008523876351.jpg
 

StatusNil

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Welcome to The Escapist, Ms. Finnegan!

I do remember playing this on the Commodore 64 back in the day, but can't say it ever occurred to me to consider it a pioneer in, er, "ludic expressiveness", as it were. I just tossed papers through windows because you could, and why wouldn't you? (Of course I never encountered many of the scenarios described in the article, probably due to sucking at the game.) So definitely an interesting point about this classic.
 

AuldMan

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Feb 25, 2015
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I think that I still have this game on my C-64 somewhere in the house. Good way to start with The Escapist!
 

darthxaos

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Playing Paperboy was like working for a mafia owned paper.

"So you don't subscribe to us, eh? It would be a shame if you got a copy... through that nice window you got there"
 

Demetirus

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Pinkilicious said:
Demetirus said:
Grats on the first article, Lizzy! Incidentally, I wonder what it says about me if I just made it a point to try and nail everyone and everything with a newspaper just because I could and doing so made me laugh gleefully?

Some paperboys just want to watch the world burn?
I liked to use the game genie to get unlimited papers and just set my Zipper to autofire! Machinegun!
http://www.8bitnes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/-31563008523876351.jpg
I like your style! This was my weapon of choice: http://www.capngames.com/images/videogames/nesmaxcontroller.jpg
 

rothron

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Feb 22, 2015
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I remember the Paperboy coin-op well. I'm sure there are some different configurations around, but the one I'm familiar with is notable for having bicycle handlebars with breaks as a controller; and at the time, it's relatively high resolution graphics: 512x384. It's a very difficult game.
 

Josh123914

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Nov 17, 2009
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Well, um, isn't this an unexpected article?

Anyway welcome to the site Lizzy, I hope you stay. However if you do, its custom to find yourself an avatar pronto. Something that says "I am a person" without being a real face, or some PoS that makes the page lag (Looking at you TopazFusion and other gif users.)
 

FrozenEscapee

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Feb 18, 2015
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I hadn't thought of Paperboy as an early example of morality options in video games, but have only played it a few times. Great article, Lizzy F.
 

wild_snail

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Feb 16, 2015
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I remember playing Paperboy 2 as a kid specifically to see what funny/naughty things I could get away with on the delivery route. It took a long while before I realized I should learn how to beat the first level in order to see what funny things I could do in the second. Eventually I got good at the game. For the laughs.
 

Aerotrain

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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.