Morality Matters

[freaper]

An interesting combination I would love to see is a Mass Effect game with the morality meter from Neverwinter Nights 2. I never got around advancing in NN2, but the idea of not being simply good, or bad, but also chaotic (random) or lawful (true) and neutral was freeing. Naturally this would require loads and loads of work extra.

Lets see how well Guild Wars 2 implements moral choices...

 

[Freechoice]

Moral choice can be implemented on a small scale in a stand alone. How? Base the choices in gameplay and make small tweaks to the game itself as it is played. It doesn't have to be huge; just a few audio and gameplay changes depending on what the player is doing. If there's only 100 lines of spoken dialogue as opposed to 1000, changing half the lines to suit the karma meter gets much simpler. The outcome then comes about in cutscenes and endings. Likewise, a tranquilizer pistol in lieu of a minigun would also be viable and cost effective.

 

[TheBelgianGuy]

What I dislike about morality, is that Good vs. Bad just ain't realistic.

Like in Fable III, your job as a king is to defend your country from a certain threat. To do that, you need money.
Should we demand more taxes? yes = Evil, no = Good. Any person with a brain would agree that, until the threat was over, paying more taxes would indeed be reasonable.

I TRY to be realistic in games. I have been playing Mass Effect 2 again. Great game. BUT it seems to expect you to either go fully Paragon or fully Renegade.
Since I was taking the realistic options, meanig not being a little goody two-shoes or a total jerk, I came upon a situation where I had to convince somebody or fight him, but both convince-options (paragon and renegade) were greyed out!
Why Bioware, why?

I thought The Witcher was very great with morality... since there was no morality at all!
Just actual choices. Should I help these elves and dwarves to rob a bank -illegally taken by humans from a dwarf- to fund their terrorist/freedom fighter group, or do I help the noble/fascist Knight and his soldiers to fend them off?
All the unforseen consequences of your actions were great.
In the beginning of the game, I was tasked with guarding a bunch of crates on a beach, when said elves came to buy them. Having the chance to fight them or give them what they want, I choose the peaceful solution.

A few hours later, the elves had murdered an NPC - with special terrorist arrows I had sold them. And I needed the NPC fo a specific quest.

THAT'S HOW IT SHOULD BE DONE. No stupid bars filling up, just choices and their consequences.

 

[Scars Unseen]

I think that most RPGs have been going about it the wrong way. What is needed isn't a choice between good and evil, or even Alpha Protocol's Suave/Professional/etc choices. These are bolt on mechanics that can never come off as anything other than contrived.

Instead of developers asking themselves "do we want moral choice in our game," they should be asking "how should players be able to affect the environment they interact with." And they need to be asking this question as early as possible. It is pretty much the most basic thing you should know about the game you are making. More basic even than our increasingly nebulous genre identifiers. More basic than preliminary control mechanics. In fact, this is the question that should determine what the game becomes, not the other way around.

In some games this is quite easy. A player interacts with SMB3 by breaking blocks, jumping pits and stomping Goombas. Call of Duty involves putting bullets into people in scripted encounters. Current RPGs are usually interacted with on a mostly superficial level with binary choices every now and then.

Let's say that the entire basis of our game is "what you do has an effect." That is going to color everything that you do to develop that game. Much more so than if you start with "we are making an RPG." If you make an RPG, choice becomes a component that may be limited and minimized to make way for other features. If you make a game based on choice and effect, that game could turn out to be an RPG, a FPS, or anything in between.

I know that some people would disagree with me on this. To some people, particularly "purists", genre matters more than content. Or more accurately, genre defines content. Unfortunately, this is pretty much how we end up in our current situation, where a game has a standard set of basic set of genre required mechanics, and anything beyond that is merely a "feature" to be implemented or cut as the budget demands.

 

[TheBelgianGuy]

I was planning on playing Chrono Trigger soon, thanks a lot... jerk.

Anyways, to be honest I just think it isn't fair to judge someone's decisions as "good or evil". I mean, a lot of decisions that I've made during Mass Effect, deemed evil by the game developers, I whole heartedly find completely rational and justified.

Who are you to judge me and tell me whether what I'm doing is evil or not?

Choices should simply be that; choices. If I make a decision, don't tell me whether I'm making the right or wrong one, don't peg a +1 demon marker over my head, simply keep the game moving and let me live with the consequences.

No good choices, no evil choices. Just choices to be made at the discretion of the player, and the consequences that follow.

I agree with you completely, though to be fair to Bioware, it's not represented as Good and Evil. It's Paragon and Renegade, and Renegade is supposed to be the 'ruthless but still justifiable'-option.
Sadly, too often being "Ruthless" means "being a ***** for no reason" in Bioware's eyes.

PS: have you played the Witcher? IF not, I think you might like the choices

 

[Android2137]

Daniel Floyd and James Portnow did longer more detailed videos on Moral Choice [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlOXAtPvMDk] prior to doing these videos for the Escapist. What this discussion did is sum up what was said there: when executing moral choice, the best way to handle is to not quantify it and if it must be done, give it more variables to chart.

 

[ThrashJazzAssassin]

It's often taken for granted that RPGs and morality systems go hand in hand, and that bugs me. Surely western RPGs are the least suitable games to include an actual morality system.

RPGs are (theoretically) supposed to offer the player a multitude of choices which they can respond to according to their own desires, or those of the character they're roleplaying. It seems more logical to leave it up to the player to judge whether their actions are good or evil. Giving away points - and even rewards - for choosing all As or all Bs can lead to a game that's technically open-ended being played pretty much the same by everyone, because people are naturally inclined to try to rack up points if points are available. Even more so if some content is withheld if you're not always good or always evil.

Mass Effect 2 is a good example of this: conversation options are withheld if you're not sufficiently Paragon/Renegade, so many players end up choosing a lot of conversation options purely on the basis of which ones will give them enough points for a specific decision later on. This makes large sections of dialogue uninteresting, because they're being used as a game mechanic rather than a means of immersing the player in the game world.

And of course you have to go along with the writers' judgment of which choice is which. There were some potentially interesting moral dilemmas in ME2 that were spoilt by BioWare's decision that the two available options corresponded to Paragon and Renegade views when in actual fact they didn't fit that mould.

 

[Speakercone]

I'd like to see a morality system where there is no good or evil option, only consequences to those decisions taken by the player.

Chrono Trigger was brought up and that court scene is an excellent example of how I think it should be done. Your actions affect the world and those in it in ways you don't or can't comprehend until it's revealed/discovered.

You can get a huge cathartic payoff from an established character finding the answer to what effect he's had on the world around him. I'm thinking specifically of It's a Wonderful Life here, but other stories have gone the other way, like Hard Candy.

How much greater would the payoff be if it's the player who experiences this?

 

[Talpini]

The question of morality in games all too often ignores the issue of ethics and meta-ethics. In a lot of games, as ThrashJazzAssassin says, the role of ethics is taken up by game mechanics, where a moral decision is one that conforms to a particular binary choice (good/evil, Jedi/Sith, Paragon/Renegade etc.). Philosophers have been struggling since, well, forever, to determine where moral get their oomph. In games, the choices are often presented as good or bad as though the choice is a clear one or, in rare cases of ambiguity, where there is a definite right one. Perhaps a player has a strictly conseuentialist viewpoint (only the results of actions matter morally) or perhaps they're more about values and unbreakable rules. The point is that morals are complicated because ethics are complicated (because meta-ethics are compicated).

I think an ethically reflective system of morality in a game would be really interesting, where moral decisions don't chart how much like Satan you look or how white your clothes are, but instead where the moral choices you (or your character) makes inform your ethical position and your character's, well, character. For example, imagine how much more satisfying a payoff it would have been at the end of Bioshock if your moral choices weren't framed in terms of good or bad, but were framed in terms of your relationship to objectivism. There are so many in game references to this philosophical system, and at times the game does a good job of exploring them, but when it comes to the ultimate moral judgment you're either a power hungry asshole or a lovable old coot. I suggest that had the designers framed the moral choices in relation to an overarching ethical system, the result would have been a potentially more illuminating and satisfying game.

Without an acknowledgment of the complexities of ethics and meta-ethics, which serve as the foundation for moral choices, games can only ever provide a moral system that rewards conformity to the developer's conception of ethics, an over-simplified and unsatisfying set of moral choices and/or a set of meaningless moral choices. Only when the game allows us to approach a moral question in reference to our own (or roleplaying self's own) ethics (derived from meta-ethics), and ideally responds to it, can moral questions be anything other than a gameplay mechanic.

Indeed, if games can provide a reflexive system that allows the player to really test and examine their own morality, the claim that games cannot be art since they require interaction is really turned on its head.

 

[Daveman]

I really liked the morality in New Vegas but I got kind of depressed when on my NCR character play through I found out that I HAD to kill the Khans (due to a bug) and the Brotherhood of Steel (due to a previous quest) in order to progress. I thought these fuckers were the good guys? Turns out my first playthrough, where I chose to pick based on what I thought was right and ended up deciding I could run this place better than anyone else, was arguably the most morally "good" because it didn't involve any bloody genocide.

 

[Mouse One]

I'm in total agreement with the dislike of the 2D morality systems. It's just never that simple in real life. We need complexity we want the game to have enough depth so that the player does care.

To take an example, Mass Effect 2's otherwise well done narrative was injured that way (IMHO!) It did have some grey morality choices, but sadly it still had a 2D Paragon/Renegade axis. To make matters worse, it directly tied into game mechanics in a very direct and obvious way. Each morality choice is highlighted in a color corresponding to which axis it will add to. The player knows that he or she is going to have to have a high score on either axis to get the optimum results at a few critical plot points. So, rather than deciding on choices based on what the player might feel is right or wrong (or at least not as wrong), the player is pretty much forced into "gaming" the morality choices. Potential complexity was reduced to "click red or blue consistently to win".

 

[mjc0961]

I think morality systems only work if the player does feel invested in the choice. But what too many games don't realise is that the players aren't automatically invested just because they say we are. I am not going to be emotionally torn over sacrificing my hero's love interest ten minutes into the game just because you rendered a single tear sliding down my hero's generic, emotionless face.

I want to print this out and mail it to everyone who had anything to do with Command and Conquer 4's plot. Hey, guess what game? I do NOT care about that random woman dying/being held hostage (depends on if you're GDI or NOD) just because you say "That's your wife." to me in a few cutscenes beforehand. You need to build some history, give me a reason to care about this character, before I get upset/pissed off/whatever emotion you want me to feel when you do horrible things to her. Otherwise I'm just going to roll my eyes and wonder when I can get back to the game.

My problem is that their only purpose in a lot of games is to deny the player access to some of the game's content until they replay the entire thing from the start. And sometimes it doesn't even do that, and you have games where the good choice and the bad choice both have exactly the same effect, and then what's the point?

And this one is getting sent to the folks over at Sucker Punch. The only thing any of the choices did in that game was give you karma points. The plot remained unchanged, however. In fact, their unwillingness to change the story based on the choices we made went too far at one point and made the game look absolutely stupid. If they had a story they wanted to tell, they should have just told it without trying to give us choices. It just made their story even less believable than it already was.

Anyway, more complex morality. They should either do it right or not bother; half-assed morality sucks. And since it's so costly and expensive, maybe they should just stick with the stories they want to tell in the first place.

 

[Evil Moo]

Is it bad that I can't help but point out that a standard morality bar is in fact 1 dimensional, not 2 dimensional?

There's a good and evil axis. That is one dimension, they are effectively a measure of the same thing. Adding the lawful/chaotic axis or something else to that, would make it two dimensional.


But yeah, other than that I can't disagree with anything they said. Really if morality needs to be pointed out to the player, rather than implicitly woven into the gameplay and story then it probably shouldn't be there.

 

[Wolfram23]

I wonder if anyone knew that Metro 2033 had a morality system? There's not a single mention of it. Turns out, throughout the game there's things you can do - like helping a beggar out or a little street urchin - that will in fact cause you to get a different version of the ending. Pretty crazy. I didn't find out until after I beat the game and was looking at a guide, and I kind of went... huh?? What ending are they talking about?!

 

[coolerthanice21]

I actually think certain aspects of the morality system in Dragon Age 2 are well done. For example, while the general dialogue options are labeled as good and bad, whenever an actual moral choice comes up, they aren't labeled. Then when you make your choice,the game only tells you how your companions percieve your choice based on their personalities, not whether the game thinks your choice was moral or immoral.

 

[ChupathingyX]

I still think Fallout: New Vegas has the best moral system out of all the games I've played. The choices in that game are not black vs white and pretty much every single faction have their pros and cons.

The big question of course is deciding in the final outcome of New Vegas and who will rule it; The NCR, Caesar's Legion, Mr House or let the people live independently.

All of these 4 choices have very different outcomes based on who you side with and what will happen to the other major factions of the Mojave.

It's much better than Fallout 3 which was full of black and white choices and made the Brotherhood of Steel look like holy knights sent to save the people of the world.

 

[thethingthatlurks]

I know this is going to sound old, but Deus Ex had the perfect morality system. There were no meters, no clearly marked decisions, nothing. Your actions ingame (such as killing enemies or knocking them unconscious) resulted in characters treating you differently. I'll never forget Sam withholding ammo when I went apeshit in that hotel. Made me rethink my actions. 'course, this breaks down a bit towards the end when you do in fact have different choices that are clearly marked, but all are gray. Benevolent dictator? Freedom through destruction? A facade of happiness and stability, yet all is being controlled by puppeteers?

While I'm on the subject, if you haven't played Deus Ex yet, get off ze interwebz, fire up steam, and download the ************! Best $5 you'll spend, I can guarantee that.

 

[VanillaBean]

Love the Chrono Trigger reference

 

[Therumancer]

Well for anyone who has ever taken a class on ethics, morality is not an inherant thing. For a game to work on a moral level, it has to have some absolutist standard of what good and evil are in that world. Irregardless of what the player might think of what's he's doing, that doesn't nessicarly make it right or wrong. A lot of people who are generally agreed upon to have been among the most evil men to ever exist (like say Hitler), actually believed they were doing the right thing. Your never going to have all people of any sort agree on any definition of good or evil usually, so for a game it's important to define how the game judges these things right from the beginning before you want to track something.

The potential in games for exploring alternative morality systems is staggering. In general people think that slavery is wrong, an outdated evil (though there are exceptions). Creating a game where say slavery was defined as a GOOD thing and building a world around a concept like that could be an interesting experience. Look at say John Norman's "Gor" novels, while much maligned they DO present a rather exotic system of alternative morality that can be fun to play around with as a concept. What's more, when you get past the shock value of how differant those values are from the ones you likely embrace in the real world, you'll probably find that some rather valid points about what's "fair" in a society are raised.

I think one of the problems with gaming though is that it's simply too squeamish of too many subjects to grow up properly. Sex, violence, and morality all share the distinction of being things the industry is afraid to deal with for fear of stepping on too many toes. With the current morality systems typically they have to present the most universally accepted, coke and pepsi, politically correct idea of good and evil that is liable to offend the least people possible, and I think that's a big part of the problem. The uncomfortable issue of evil is usually addressed by making it so ridiculous and over the top, that nobody can take it seriously. Never mind the whole issue that it's typically impossible to get anywhere within the morality system if you don't commit 100% one way or the other.

In short I think the whole issue exists not because of the amount of work involved, but simply due to a lack of guts within the gaming industry. Nobody wants to take the risks and criticism involved in moving the medium forward.

I'll also say that I think "good" is a long standing problem in moral systems in games. See in a game being evil has a lot of obvious rewards. It's easier, and killing and stealing give one access to money and loot. Being a good guy complicates things, and unless someone hands you a lot of extra money for being a nice guy periodically (which is kind of unrealistic when defending the downtrodden and such) you rarely see any benefit. Sometimes you'll see some kind of ultimate reward tied to being good, like some kind of penultimate holy sword or whatever, but increasingly I find that even when it comes to a long-term payoff, there are usually evil equivilents nowadays "to be fair".


It's an interesting conundrum, when your dealing with something that relies on tangible rewards. The lure of some kind of heaven just isn't as powerful in a video game as it is in real life, so it'snot like you can argue any kind of spiritual rewards involved.

This is a big issue, and one I think games need to address I think.

That said, I guess it's the way I'm wired, but I still prefer to try and be the good guy even when there are no overt rewards involved in doing so. That said, I think I'm in a relatively small minority which is in part why I think the good paths and factions oftentimes seem to be so stereotypical and neglected.

 

[Ultimatecalibur]

I think one of the best uses of a morality system has to be in the Shin Megami Tensei series.

The games themselves have a 2 axis system (Law/Chaos and Light/Dark), but there is only one axis the player character can move on: Law/Chaos. In all of the games both sides have their good and bad points and in order to get the "best" ending you have to make balanced choices and choose the neutral route.