Morality in Gaming

[VondeVon]

Hmm.

The potential fixes for morality systems go around the forums every so often, but I think I'm getting to the point where I just don't see why we have to have morality systems at all.

When I eat a chick alive (And I loved Fable II, for making evil seem 'cool') I *know* what I'm doing is wrong, or evil. I don't need a little point marker or visual effect to tell me. Plus, when I slaughter a village of people, no-one should suddenly start fearing me unless I let survivors live to tell the tale.

As to moral-based endings..? Well, I'm not advocating them being abolished entirely, but I'd like to see multiple endings based on choices other than moral ones.

 

[Yassen]

I'd suggest you watch this video, the author does a number of lectures on games raising interesting topics like choice, sex, facing controversy and story telling.

 

[Revolutionary]

yeah morality isnt quite that simple.

 

[Haagrum]

There's two main ways of doing morality in gaming.

The first is a simplistic "good/evil" dichotomous approach with a direct consequence (good points/bad points). The problem is that things are seldom so black and white, and the distinction is usually more of a case of "saint/baby-murderer". There's usually a gain from being as good/evil as possible, so you lead people down one path which is easy to choose.

The second contrasts pragmatism against idealism, which doesn't have immediately observable consequences and doesn't put you on a single continuum by which everyone in the game judges you (even though the choices are still often pretty binary). Idealistic choices don't usually "cost" you something directly, and pragmatic choices don't "cost" you in terms of how non-party NPCs view you unless it's part of the main story and your actions have directly affected them.

However, I'm completely in favour of games which have "morally good" choices which have consequences quite different to those intended. Tenpenny Tower in Fallout 3 is a good example. With reload knowledge, the most "moral" way of dealing with these situations is probably not to get involved, but people will do anything for XP.

Spoiler: For example...

Dragon Age - The "morally good" choice for Orzammar ends up being a poor choice for a ruler, while the lying, backstabbing, murdering tyrant ends up being a positive force for change. In-game, there's virtually no difference in the effect.

Generally, there aren't enough "real" consequences for the different choices people make in games, but that's partly because game development is a business and there's only so much non-essential non-linearity that you can fit into a project with tight timeframes and testing schedules.

 

[Fenreil]

This is not a question of what side of the morality spectrum you play as...it is more of a question whether morality can actually work in video games.

It seems as if whenever I play a game with morality (ie Fable, Mass Effect, KOTOR) the questions are extremely simplistic, this action gives you +10 good points, the other gives you +10 bad points. In my view, there haven't been any games that grasp the concept of morality, where one action can have more than one consequence.

How do you see it?

I agree that morality in games uses D&D style points systems, and that this isn't realistic or all that intriguing from the standpoint of a good story.

At the same time, games are 100% mathematical formulas running on computers, and I appreciate it as a true modern miracle of technology that we can get any sense of reality or depth from these great piles of math at all.

Now, that said, of course writing could be more realistically complex, and the game could be made to simulate this. But that means someone has to plot all these divergent threads out and account for every possible variation. Which would be awesome. But also insanely complex, and therefore time consuming, and therefore prohibitively expensive.

So while I agree with you completely, I also think we should be happy with what we have, and not expect much more. Unless we're willing to pay for it.

This pretty much sums it up for me.

As a side note, my favorite morality system has been Bioshock 2. Sure, it isn't complex in the slightest, and there's only two variables affecting the system, but the actual effect worked. I felt that it excelled in making me feel that I acted according to the two pathways. In other games, you can slaughter tons of innocents and not feel a thing, while in Bioshock, killing the little sisters was pretty guilt-ridden. The same feeling was true with the "good" path.

Maybe it's best to leave the scale small. It's just too hard to make a complex and functional morality system for larger games (like Fable and Fallout), so maybe they should just stick with the points system. "Smaller" games, however, can focus on either having a better system, or a more engaging one.

 

[psivamp]

Multi-dimensional systems like the one used in DnD (at least up to 3.5, because I haven't seen 4th edition) are good. Faction relations, good. Hiding the immediate results on how the game considers your actions, good -- also, this would allow the game to modify its opinion of how you saved the puppies when you give them to a demon-worshipper to summon a plague upon Town A.

This whole debate reminds me of the conversation system in Planescape: Torment. You could lie to people about your beliefs, or actions. I never popped the hood and looked to see what happened to the games mechanics when you stated certain beliefs truthfully or falsely, but it was very interesting to be given each major option twice -- once where you believed it and again saying that you didn't. When it comes down to actions, unless they are chosen from a menu, the game has to wait it out and see what you do later to really know if your action had good intentions. This problem is far more complex than just attributing values to individual actions rather than tracking and characterizing a chain of events.

 

[McMarbles]

What I'd like to see:

*Choices that lead to real consequences, not nebulous "karma points".

*Choices where there is no "good" or "bad" choice.

 

[TheBluesader]

This is not a question of what side of the morality spectrum you play as...it is more of a question whether morality can actually work in video games.

It seems as if whenever I play a game with morality (ie Fable, Mass Effect, KOTOR) the questions are extremely simplistic, this action gives you +10 good points, the other gives you +10 bad points. In my view, there haven't been any games that grasp the concept of morality, where one action can have more than one consequence.

How do you see it?

I agree that morality in games uses D&D style points systems, and that this isn't realistic or all that intriguing from the standpoint of a good story.

At the same time, games are 100% mathematical formulas running on computers, and I appreciate it as a true modern miracle of technology that we can get any sense of reality or depth from these great piles of math at all.

Now, that said, of course writing could be more realistically complex, and the game could be made to simulate this. But that means someone has to plot all these divergent threads out and account for every possible variation. Which would be awesome. But also insanely complex, and therefore time consuming, and therefore prohibitively expensive.

So while I agree with you completely, I also think we should be happy with what we have, and not expect much more. Unless we're willing to pay for it.

This pretty much sums it up for me.

As a side note, my favorite morality system has been Bioshock 2. Sure, it isn't complex in the slightest, and there's only two variables affecting the system, but the actual effect worked. I felt that it excelled in making me feel that I acted according to the two pathways. In other games, you can slaughter tons of innocents and not feel a thing, while in Bioshock, killing the little sisters was pretty guilt-ridden. The same feeling was true with the "good" path.

Maybe it's best to leave the scale small. It's just too hard to make a complex and functional morality system for larger games (like Fable and Fallout), so maybe they should just stick with the points system. "Smaller" games, however, can focus on either having a better system, or a more engaging one.

You're right. Small scale morality is easier to handle and would therefore be deeper and more interesting. But we live in an era of $100 million dollar game budgets and now they're rolling out 3D, so don't hold your breath. Not if you're a console person, anyway.

Personally, I'm more interested in games with complex choice systems that don't necessarily have anything to do with good or evil morality. It's actually more fun not to know which option a game "wants" you to pick, especially if the game doesn't actually care. I'm talking about the kind of things that happened in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines - different choices led to wildly different dialogue trees and endings to missions, and none of them were the right ones or the wrong ones.

It's great when you have a game you can play through like seven times and every time get new and different outcomes, at least as far as side missions are concerned. Good and evil morality systems mean you've only got incentive to play through twice - for the good and evil ending. Which is okay, but it isn't exactly realistic, so it just isn't as compelling.

 

[xdgt]

Witcher people, greatest moral choices i ever saw in a game. There is no absolute good or evil, everything is gray, you let the cannibal go in order for him to give you info on the missing child or kill him, help the racist kill the elves or let the elves rob a bank so they could buy weapons to sustain their war, kill the murderer or run off to save the innocent from being devoured by a monster. It is gray and the consequences of your choices are not immideately seen. The choices between two evil (and sometimes its hard judging which is the lesser evil) or complete neutrality apeals to me much more than strictly good/evil.

 

[Entropyutd]

People like to play the bad guy, mainly because they don't get to make the bad moral choices in real life.
I haven't seen any really good morality systems, but I think they are redundant in gaming anyway.
You want to be an over cutesy good guy, play a JRPG, want to be a douche, play GTA, I don't think anyone took control of Nico and though "Oh man I wish I didn't have to kill people or deliver drugs" In fact the game even tried to put a human face on the guy via dating / events, and we all know how maligned that concept is.