Rethinking Morality in Games

[Fuhjem]

Morality systems in games have become a standard in today's games. The first one I remember, although maybe not the first in existence, was in Lionhead's hit game Fable. Since then, every RPG and many Action games have taken on the mantle of morality. Some promising long lasting effects of choices, and a world that warps as you make changes to it.
But, as I see it, not every moral choice in real life is based off of whether you want to kill your family or not, or whether you want to call someone a jackass or call them a hero.

A way of rethinking morality in games is to look at who we deem to be evil nowadays. Sure, terrorists who kill mass amounts of people for sick pleasure are evil, but so is the corrupt CEO who abuses his power.

The following is a portion of a plot for a game I made up about a year ago, along with it's retooled morality system.

Imagine a world, a moon of a Gas Giant, habitable and full of life. A forrestral moon, just like Endor from Star Wars. The place is SMOTHERED with trees. Now you, the main character, has been blessed (or cursed, if you want to delve into the actual plot) with the ability to control and manipulate fire.
Being able to control fire on a place teeming with flammable life might not be so good for the morally light hearted.
Now this is where the longstanding choice comes in, the one constantly present and always challenging you.
Do you embrace the most destructive force known to your people, hoping to use it to it's full extent and make reaching your final goal easier?
or
Do you resist the temptation of your powers, and choose to use weapons in battle.
The choice may look simple, because it is.

Why would I NOT want to use my powers?
Why WOULD I make the game harder for me?
How STUPID would I be to ignore such power?
That is the same mindset as those evil men in suits.
The ones corrupted with POWER.

Should you choose to embrace power, your choice could have very negative impacts on the moon where you live. Fire spreads; to trees, to villages. Killing many and destroying homes.
Embracing the fire makes every step you take leave a smoldering footprint. Every person you touch feels as though they are on fire.
Resisting that power leaves you weak and less powerful.

How far would a player be willing to go to stay pure? To handle every battle with caution and know that they are at the same level, or even less, as their opponents?

An example:

Sometime in the game you are confronted with a giant monster, twice as big as a house, maybe three times, and it's heading for a highly populated village. And, it is covered in trees and foliage.
If you have been using fire throughout the game, just lighting up the beast's legs and watching it burn like a building into a hill of ashes would be a cinch.

If you chose the high road this whole time, and dedicated yourself to using swords and bows and other weapons, taking out this behemoth would be most similar to killing a Colossus. Having to scale its towering legs and stabbing weak points across it's back could take a long time, and also be deadly to yourself.

The choice is yours.



Would anyone like to elaborate on this rethink of morality?

Comment and give your opinions.

 

[Fuhjem]

Er, um.. Bump?

 

[ArcWinter]

I would probably play through as corrupted(easy), then play through as the moral hero(hard), then play a third time using fire cautiously, as well as weapons(tricky).

Or maybe I'd just go to another planet.

 

[Internet Kraken]

So you're essentially going to give the evil character all the cool powers while a good character has to stick with generic swords and guns?

 

[Fuhjem]

So you're essentially going to give the evil character all the cool powers while a good character has to stick with generic swords and guns?

In the real world, those corrupted with power tend to have the best stuff, and have an easier life.

Those who resist temptation must suffer for it.

 

[Internet Kraken]

So you're essentially going to give the evil character all the cool powers while a good character has to stick with generic swords and guns?

In the real world, those corrupted with power tend to have the best stuff, and have an easier life.

Those who resist temptation must suffer for it.

That doesn't make for a very good game. At all. People primary play a game to have fun. Therefore, they are going to play it the way that is most fun. Being a good hero would significantly detract from the fun in this game. So this would fail as a good morality system.

 

[Fuhjem]

I can see where your concern is, but it's an untested idea, and we won't know until it is in an actual game.

 

[Kermi]

Here's the thing. You're talking about morality in a game - you're giving people the power to choose through their actions what they want to do. Once people know what the consequences of their choices are, they'll still manipulate the system to achieve their desired outcome. If they want to be "good", they'll avoid using fire at all cost. Evil characters will just use the fire and be done with it. It really is that simple.

The only way to effectively utilise morality is to make everything morally ambiguous, and this amounts to tricking the player into doing something they might not necessarily have chosen to do otherwise - and that's not fair on the player. Granted, life is unfair is that way sometimes, but we're not playing games because we want them to accurately portray the real world. Of course at the same time we clamour for a morality system that actually works, so at best we're a pack of fucking hypocrites.

 

[Iron Mal]

A good morality scale shouldn't be between 'good' and 'evil' because they are very subjective ideals, in fact, I would say that creating a definition for evil is the hardest bit of making a morality scale for anything.

For example, murdering someone in Fallout 3 is typically an evil act (and you will be informed of a karma loss) but if you are truely evil then you wouldn't view wanton destruction and serial killing as evil in any way (how many good villians admit to being evil or set out to be an outragous bastard?), they would either be nessercary for what they percieve to be the greater good or otherwise justified from their perspective (for a villain to acknowledge what he is doing as evil would suggest that guilt and perhaps even regret is present, this means that said individual may not nessercarily be evil).

When it comes to determining what is evil things can get really confusing (as you can see by the example above) since from their own perspective everyone is a good guy (even Hitler had good intentions, he just went about it the wrong way).

 

[Flour]

Wait.. the ability to control fire does not include the ability to stop fire from spreading?

Ignoring that massive plot hole, if the player doesn't start as the ruler of that planet, and there's no option for that to ever happen then the planet will burn.

 

[Radeonx]

I can see where your concern is, but it's an untested idea, and we won't know until it is in an actual game.

No.
It still won't work. The best way to do morality, in my opinion, is allow people to pick what powers they have, and make their choices affect the story in multiple ways.
Not give people the best powers.

 

[high_castle]

I had to laugh that your first example of morality in a game came from Fable. Seriously, Fable? Not Baldur's Gate? Not Neverwinter Nights? Okay. I'll bite.

Your main problem, I think, is that you confuse power with corruption. Yes, we've all heard absolute power corrupts absolutely. But to say that every person with a tiny spark of power would automatically turn evil is just nonsense. Using magic in BG or NWN doesn't make you evil (as it shouldn't). It's not the power that makes you evil, but what you choose to do with it. Just as in real life. We train people to become expert gunmen in the army. They have a lot of physical power. But not every single army sniper goes off on a rampage because he can. Same thing with magic. I'm really confused by the point you're trying to make.

 

[Rusty Bucket]

But, as I see it, not every moral choice in real life is based off of whether you want to kill your family or not, or whether you want to call someone a jackass or call them a hero.

Apparently it's about whether you want to set fire to an entire damn moon or not. What you've described is nothing new, it's the same stuff, just dressed a little differently.

 

[irishstormtrooper]

So you're essentially going to give the evil character all the cool powers while a good character has to stick with generic swords and guns?

In the real world, those corrupted with power tend to have the best stuff, and have an easier life.

Those who resist temptation must suffer for it.

Exactly. The reason this moral system of yours won't work is that it forces "good" players to have to jump through more hoops in order to do the same stuff. Everyone who plays the game will want to be evil, because they get badass powers, and it's easier.

A better moral system would be something like inFamous's, possibly with fewer black/white moral choices and more of a gray area.

 

[Rack]

Morality systems in games are always going to be tricky, because there's no real morality going on, give the best toys to evil characters and everyone is going to be evil because no-one is really getting hurt. Fable 2 did have some fun with this idea by messing around with making minor sacrifices necessary to be good, but nothing of the scale you suggested. Early on in Fallout 3 if you didn't have a good route to making money you could only do so much good as helping people out put a strain on your resources, while Dead Rising had a similar constraint regarding your time. These smaller scale devices work quite well.

I'd also like to see more moral choices that aren't so black and white. Having to do difficult or unpleasant things for the greater good, or even just for the power you may need later.

 

[Fuhjem]

To irishstormtrooper, that is precisely the point of my system.

Being good is tough. It should be.

The dark side is always tempting, always has been.

 

[Therumancer]

I think one of the issues is that in the constraint of a game morality systems it's nearly impossible to reward good behavior effectively. This is especially true in heroic fantasy games and such where presumably the idea is to be a hero, but they want to have villain or anti-hero options as well.

The benefits to being "bad" are obvious, access to powerful "black" magic spells, forbidden powers, life sucking weapons, and similar things. Conceptually oftentimes right from the get go. On top of this it presents "easy" solutions to problems by just killing anyone who has something you want, not to mention the benefits of stealing from stores and such even when you don't need to. It's very easy for the game to track and reward such behavior.

In comparison how do you make moral judgements about good behavior in a sandbox? You can't track things like this the same way when it comes to acts of benevolence and heroism outside of dialogue trees. This limits in many cases how much "good" a character can do compared to evil. Work arounds like donations to charity making people "good" and such rapidly become a joke, because characters can pretty much run around, kill everyone, wallow in black magic, and then donate a pile of blood money to the church and all of a sudden they are cantidates for sainthood. I suppose you can make some grim jokes about that being "realistic" but it doesn't work for heroic fantasy.


On top of that there is the whole Heavy-metalesqe "Evil Is Cool" thing. You see people putting more effort into evil abillities and such than into their good counterparts. Oftentimes this winds up making evil substantially easier/more powerful even before all the extra loot and such. Arguably this is something that doesn't work within heroic fantasy where the idea is typically that good triumphs over evil in the end, and that the easy path to quick power does not wind up being stronger in the final equasion.


Truthfully I've long thought games should put more effort into developing good-related power sets, and seriously buffing their high-end abillities, as well as providing more in the way of good-guy benefits.

Also I've been of the opinion that being "good" does not nessicarly meaning having to be a complete sap, and I feel that this is something else that can be represented in a game.

I've often felt that in games where you recruit party members, evil characters should largely be dependant on paying their companions/minions. Especially since they behave like jerks. Where good characters should inspire genuine loyalty.

In games with armies and such involved, again, the bad guys should be fighting for gold and personal gain, and have a lot of morale issues, where the good guys if rallied behind a good leader become inspired to lay down their lives for the cause and don't break under any conditions (which is incidently a heroic fantasy stereotype).

Sure, guys will follow some Paragon like Aragorn into the mouth of hell (or Mordor) in a doomed last crusade without flinching. On the other hand when things get mildly inconveinent the troops of a Dark Lord character who fries a few minions once in a while for yucks, all conveinently decide they want to be somewhere else.



-

Speaking for the game the OP recommends, I think the idea is fundementally sound. It vaguely reminds me of some of Michael Moorcock's writings where Chaos uses magic and sorcery, and Order winds up using highly advanced technology and miracles which can oftentimes be indistinguishable from magic. Of course despite general tendencies in certain books, neither side is truely good or evil. The old AD&D alignment system based ideas like "Chaotic Good" and "Lawful Evil" off of his writings (which include FAR more than Elric) for example... but that goes well off the subject.

However, if your making tech good, and magic/powers evil, what you should wind up doing for game design is to make it so that to begin with powers are very strong, especially when the monsters and enemies are weak. Making the beginnings of the game a breeze. However only someone dedicated to a moral path will be able to use high end weapons when the game becomes more difficult, while powers become heavily resisted and things simply become massively harder if you rely on them and don't have access to the high end tech. Perhaps some kind of DNA lock on high end equipment that reads "corruption" and every time a power was used limits the high end gear that can be used, with the most powerful "so overkill, it makes things a joke" weapon that shows up when things become head bangingly difficult with powers only availible to someone who has NEVER even activated a power once. Some kind of legendary powered armor with angelic motifs perhaps that has been heralded as a world savior in game lore from the very beginning. You get that and you ARE the baddest thing on the planet, final boss included.

 

[Jekken6]

How about, being evil gets you instant reward, that is pretty good, but being good gets you better rewards in the long term? Like saving Megaton just because you want to, not for money. If you do that, people give you small things that may be useful, like some ammo, food and stimpacks.

 

[Anarchemitis]

I would so buy this game.
On topic, you see morality for what it really is.
"In the real world, those corrupted with power tend to have the best stuff, and have an easier life.

Those who resist temptation must suffer for it."
Which is why I'm a rather heartless person.

I'd much rather be happy with what, where and how I am, then any worldly comprimise, or even smart, any day.

 

[badgersprite]

I think you're on the right track with thinking about video game morality. The major problem I have with video game morality systems is that they're generally just there for their own sake, and have no real effect on gameplay, which means there's really no point in thinking about them. Something like this that directly ties into gameplay and skills is more along the right track of how morality should be taken into account in a game. It can't just be about a bunch of random choices you're confronted with once in quests that never come into play again - it has to be a core element of how the game is structured. =)