Morality Matters, Part 2

[Arcane Azmadi]

Am I the only one who played The Witcher? (I know Yahtzee did, but he said he didn't finish it because he honestly couldn't stand it, which I think is a shame but there you go.) The game has a morality system of sorts, but it's integrated into the allegiance system. Rather than choose between "good" and "evil" as such, you side with either the Order of the Flaming Rose, a templar-like group of lawful good but often rather bigoted and racist knights, or the Scoia'tael, a rebel group of elven and dwarven freedom-fighters-cum-terrorists struggling to fight for the rights of their oppressed people (you can also stay neutral and keep your hands to yourself). I was quite shocked when what I thought was a simple moral choice earlier in the game came back to haunt me later- I'd been asked by a smuggler to guard some of his goods overnight when a Scoia'tael party came up to me and told me they had come to pick up the supplies the smuggler had for them. I hadn't been told about this, so I had the choice to either let them take the supplies, which they said were food and medicine their people needed, or fight them. I sympethised with their plight and let them take the goods, but some time later in the game I was leaning on a drug dealer for information. I went to meet him in a bar, only to find out that a Scoia'tael commando group had broken in and murdered him in public as punishment for addicting some of their people to his drugs for profit. To make an example of him, they'd used the medieval equivalent of a terror weapon- a sort of arrow that functioned like a dum-dum round, useless against armour but capable of producing horrific results against an unarmoured civilian and my character commented that the weapons had undoubtably been in the supply shipment I'd let the Scoia'tael take ealier. It was then that I realised that although I'd though I'd made a "good" decision by letting the oppressed rebels take the supplies they desperately needed, I'd actually handed terror weapons over to terrorists. Not only did I fail the quest I'd been on as my contact was dead, that event shook me to my core.

On the other hand, the Order of the Flaming Rose are the kind of self-righteous, stuck up, bigoted authority figures I would normally avoid like the plague in these games. However, my first real contact with them in the game was through the character of Siegfried, a noble, polite, generous and really quite helpful templar who I took an immediate liking to. This led me to side with the order simply because I felt I owed him a favour for helping me with an early quest. He also told me more about the order which made it seem not so bad- they don't ask payment for their services from anyone and anybody is free to join them, even a social outcast like my character (although actually joining them is not an option in-game). The shades of grey in The Witcher make it the game which I think has the best morality system of any I've ever played.

 

[loodmoney]

I think the issue with most games that attempt "Morality" is that the decisions you are asked to make do not look anything like the moral decisions you make in everyday life. Not in the sense that game decisions are on a much larger scale than the everyday, but in the sense that they ask you to choose between right and wrong.

Assuming you are not a hard-core amoralist, you never have to choose between right or wrong in real life. You have to choose between actions or outcomes that appear good. Do I spend more time with my family, or more time working so that they can live in comfort? Is it my duty to fight for my country, or it it to not kill other humans? You never have to choose between buying a child a balloon, and punching her in the face.

Even if Neumann is right that morality is fun because both sides are fun, still: morality in games is engaging only if it resembles the moral choices that we are engaged in facing everyday.

The flash game "Loved" has the best moral choice system in it as far as I'm concerned, but I'm not sure if this is much related to the argument above.

 

[toapat]

the issue with morality, is that it is always the black and white morality. Good vs Evil isnt an interesting morality to play, its too common, and too easy. Red/Green is also rather dull, being either Communism vs Capitolism, or Nature vs Machine. what we need now, are moralities which we are not used to. perhaps a blue and orange morality where science is given free reign, but to allow applied technology to be used is seen as immoral.

 

[Da_Vane]

The focus of player actions is important. For the most part, morality stands outside of gameplay, and therefore is largely ignored. You don't feel bad about Pac Man eating Ghosts, or Kirby eating his enemies, because this is the gameplay. It's not a moral decision - there is no morality involved.

Morality is really only important when it actually becomes part of the gameplay itself. Notice how all the better ways morality are handled are in games which also feature similar RPG elements about character development and choice? This is because that's what morality is - character development. It's also treated as no different than any other choice - being good or evil within a system is really no different than choosing between weapons and magic in RPG.

This is why the best stuff is reserved for extreme morality - just as extreme sword techniques are reserved for dedicating a lot of time and character development to extreme sword use. It's the same system and the same concept, and for the large part, if there wasn't an incentive to keep focused and get better, players would stop and focus elsewhere, because they've explored all the mechanics of that aspect of the game.

What is interesting is that morality is also most commonly applied outside of games, and ideas like common sense, narrative structure, nobility, and roleplaying can all provoke actions and moral choices that are not rationalised by game mechanics themselves. Take the Sims for example - there is no morality or objective to the Sims in any of the games, yet you look at the gameplay of Sims players, and they are routinely overlaying their own ideals and rules, their own sense of morality, on the game itself. For gamers who go in without ideas, these are boring - there's very few goals to actually go after that the game itself provides an incentive for. But for those players that already know what they want to play, the stories they want to tell, and so forth the Sims is perfect, because it's so open that it's letting them do just that.

All of this is keenly seen in The Sims Medieval, which is unfortunately a very badly designed game. It's tried to combine simulation and strategy, and ended up with the worst of both. This is because it features quite a few mechanical issues, as they've basically enforced everything that is normally provided outside of the game to become part of the core gameplay. It's not optional, or expected, but demanded - and the game penalises you for not bringing your own ideas to the game. There's no incentive for this - in fact, it's very counter-intuitive especially to strategy gamers that would be most likely to otherwise enjoy the limited simulation and more structured objective format. Yet, in discussions these issues are always solved by "roleplaying" and other "metagame" concepts that take place outside of the gameplay mechanics the game itself provides. It's like the Sims does Fable, where things are done for their own sake, rather than because there is any objective or incentive to do so.

This is where morality lies for the most part - Foucault-based power theory argues that we self-govern by imposing our own limits and our own rules based upon what we experience and what we expect. Games have, for the large part, been regarded as models for various aspects of reality - we only apply morality in games we believe to be about morality. Games that don't have morality are often focusing on other things - on other skills and abilities. Like all models, morality doesn't apply when you perform experiments in science, it doesn't apply when you solve an equation in mathematics, and so forth. This is because morality is a variable, and in all models, we reduce the variables to what is relevant. We then get to pick and choose what is relevant - and if morality IS relevant, we would have defined it as such. In games, if morality is not a defined variable, it is not expected to be relevant.

But in society, morality IS constantly relevant, because morality is a big part of a person's identity, since it defines (or is defined by) their perception and intent towards others. Being able to identify this is a very important social survival technique.

If you want to know morality through gaming, use a multi-player game, particularly split-screen or co-op gaming with scores and the option of friendly-fire. Someone who will attack their team mates for extra points or more rupees will most likely do this in real life too. This is not default behaviour because that is the game - that's an actual moral choice. It's backed up by the Theory of Altruism, which makes for some interesting gameplay, and great for letting you know which friends you want watching you back, and which you really don't.

 

[delanofilms]

James seriously put the icing on the cake on that one!

 

[Neferius]

And THIS is yet another reason why I despise Fable 3
When you are good and pious, people cheer and shower you with gifts like you were some kind of Victorian-age Rock Star.
But if you are pure Evil, all they do is boo, hiss and/or scream like little children in your presence ...but nothing else.
Where has the humble silent groveling from Fable TLC gone I wonder? And where are the bribes Jasper mentioned?!

Admittedly, all the constant annoyance does make it so much easier to slaughter them by the dozens in order to upgrade one weapon or another... but it's still very, very annoying.