The Morality System in Games Has Outlived Its Usefulness

[StriderShinryu]

While I don't think morality systems in games have always been done well, I'd much rather have them than not. I think we've already seen a growth in morality systems away from stuff that can be extremely easily gamed towards something that is more organic. I also feel that Fable is actually a pretty poor example of a good morality system simply because nothing in the core experience or storyline really changes, and that should be the focus of a morality system. Does my avatar end up with a permanent scar because I made a certain choce? Sure, but that doesn't really change anything. The more "obvious" decisions in Mass Effect however do actually make a real alteration in the storyline.

 

[F-I-D-O]

I always found the Metro games to have an interesting system. You simply go through the interactions in the game, with only a slight audio cue or flash occurring after events to signify importance.
In Last Light, you can knock people out or kill them when sneaking up, but I actually varied that based on my situation. During the second captivity escape, I killed everyone because I was pissed. Earlier, I just knocked out people, as I saw no point in killing them. Despite later letting two antagonists live, I still got the "bad" ending because of the bloodbaths of certain sections.
In 2033, there was a moment when I really should have been looting bodies for ammo. However, the environment I was in was incredibly claustrophobic and creepy. As I grabbed some ammo from a corpse, the cue (in 2033, there was no flash, just a Dark One's noise) triggered, causing me to dart around, looking for the enemy, just in time to see Bourbon start freaking out. The distraction from the loot lead me to help him, rather than continue going for parts.
The cue fits thematically as well (especially in the first game), once the player realizes

Spoiler

The Dark Ones are trying to communicate with him.

What I liked about the Metro games is that there's a feeling that comes with the cue, once the player recognizes it. It's a more vague form of the "X will remember this" from Telltale games, and it fit the atmosphere nicely.

When people mention moving from the generic good/evil moral system, I'm surprised at how rarely they are brought up. No, morality isn't the focus, but it does decide the ending and the general experience of surviving the game.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Eh I actually prefer seeing all the stat/bonuses on screen when I make choices, not seeing them or knowing what they do would piss me off a bit. Kotor 2 was my favorite in this regard, I had to carefully craft myself depending on who I had with me to earn their trust (or not).

Not saying every game should have it or that it should ALWAYS be this way, but I don't see a problem with it. It fit just fine in mass effect. Also anything can be permanent if you make it, like an ironman mode, but I don't really like it when dev's force it upon you. (hell it ends up getting modded out most times anyways.) It's like the people who complain about fast travel, don't use it if you don't like it, no one is stopping you.

I do agree though with choices not being so obviously polar opposites of each other on a black and white scale, you have to go out of your way to "kill the puppy" while most "save the puppy's" just mean letting it be on it's merry way or sorts.

I think KOTOR 2 had one of the best uses of the morality system, a lot of the choices managed to be morally ambigous in spite of the light side/dark side scheme all Star Wars games use. Not to mention the speech Kreia gives you that you could cause misfortune to someone even if you have the best of intentions.

The morality system is just a tool, albeit one that's almost always misused; either via locking up half of a game's quests or powers (like InFamous) or by being too simplistic (like in Bioshock). That's not to say it hasn't being used right, as game like the two KOTORs and Planescape: Torment show; Torment, in particular, made it almost impossible to beat the game being evil, not by making the gameplay more difficult, but by taking the evil choice to its logical conclusion, turning you into a cold uncaring monster.

yeah, and I agree with that, I just felt like the article was semi-cherry picking what it wanted to to fit the argument. And as I mentioned, there isn't necessarily one "right" way to do it, I have no problem with games trying different things, or having options in the menu to turn things on or off (like seeing the effects of your choices, such as paragon or renegade, etc..) and kotor 2 is one great way to bring importance to party members and to give difficulty to making choices.

 

[Holythirteen]

Some games have done some interesting things weaving morality into the story, but I wouldn't consider that a morality "system". I like what those guys are doing, but if everybody's going to muck it up with save puppy/stomp puppy style choices I'd rather they not bother. The more I hear about infamous' system, the more it annoys me, its either go all-dark or all-light or gimp your character, is that right? That's not a choice.

I liked how Kotor did it, sometimes the dark choices were a bit...mindless, but at least it fits better in that context, sith lords are allowed to be a little crazy, right? You could make a few compromises to your alignment for items/credits, at the expense of delaying you max dark/light bonus. Kinda pointless but at least you felt like you were making choices.

And the author is kinda clueless on a couple details, fallout 3 only gave you karma for killing named bad guys like burke and paradise falls slavers. Fallout New Vegas did give you Karma for killing Feral Ghouls and Fiends, but I think that was just to give you a way to fill your good bar besides all the one-time NPC reactions. And killing Legionnaires didn't give you karma. Not sure why you bring fallout into it, karma levels made very little difference(3 had some dumb stuff attached to karma, mostly companions, Vegas phased alot of that out and focused mainly on the reputation system), so you were free to do what you wanted. Thanks for pretending to research my favorite game so you could ***** about infamous tho.

But yeah, joining the legion as a woman was just stupid, they wouldn't even acknowledge you were a woman unless you tried to enter the arena. I assume they had to cheap out and couldn't redo the whole questline for different genders.

 

[immortalfrieza]

I don't know about everybody else, but for me morality systems in games haven't outlived their usefulness, far from it in fact. Actually, I'd say due to both the effective story that they tend to have and the replayability that it offers, games with morality systems are one of the few where I feel that the content I get out of it is enough that I can really justify shelling out $60 for them (the rest being RPGs with really good stories and gameplay, like the Tales series) instead of just renting it or waiting for a sale to cut the price down. Even blatantly obvious black and white morality systems with extreme choices are better than not having them at all.

I'd say the game that does morality systems best would be Shadow The Hedgehog, which is the reason it's my favorite Sonic game. This is not because of the choices made, which are pretty clear cut if unclear as to what to do if one doesn't go out of their way to find out, but in the results of them. For all the undeserved flak that game gets, the one thing it undeniably has going for it is it's one of the few games with morality systems that actually change what happens depending on the choices made. If you make an evil choice, the next level and the eventual ending will be VERY different than if you had made a good or neutral choice, which is how all mortality systems should work. It's one of the few games that can actually genuinely have the tagline "no two playthroughs will be the same" (at least for a while) even if the canonical story is fixed in the end.

 

[ThunderCavalier]

Another interesting take on morality systems was in Spec Ops: The Line, I feel. Though hardly an RPG, the choices you make at various points of the story do actually reflect on the kind of person you (the character and/or player) are, and there is a cost to not acting. And then the game turns that on its head, and the decisions you made are revealed to not be what you thought they were. Trying to avoid spoilers, here

Whether that approach can be extended to other games, or whether it's just something else that makes Spec Ops: The Line distinctive, is open to debate. But it's certainly a different approach, an one far better integrated into the game, than the accumulation of red and blue points.

This.

I think the main issue people have with morality systems is that really poorly implemented ones allows for writers to get away with mediocre plot and storyline by boiling down parts of games to overly simplistic Good-Evil choices.

As everyone has said before me, welldone morality systems make for some good plots.

 

[Scow2]

I think the article author's opinion is too clouded by being too immersed in a 'Good" upbringing.

Punching the reporter in the face is one of the best moments available in the game as a Renegade Shepard, and giving her a thorough beatdown in the third game was even better... as was letting the council die.

My least favorite part about Mass Effect's moral system, though, would have been when trying to give the Paragon dialogue option for why I let the Council die in the first place - that there was no way he could justify demanding the destruction of dozens of ships and sacrifice of half the citadel to save a single ship, no matter how self-important the passengers on that ship were. Instead, my guy started going off about how it was an opportunity to put Humanity at the helm of the galaxy, making me say "What!?"


As for Fallout 3 - Civilization is slowly rebuilding. Being a 'messiah of the wasteland' makes the healing process go faster, and allows your character to be given the respect/fear he deserves for his actions: WHen there are few people in the world, their actions matter. The only valid complaint I saw was how killing Feral Ghouls gives Good Karma.

Yes, being a Good person is Easy in games - that's largely because games strip away the disincentives to be bad: Security(you never have to worry about putting your life on the line because you can reload) - Money (Adventurers make lots of money through killing people and taking their life savings, but the world is full of people who deserve to die. I imagine the situation would be different if all those raider outposts were armed communities trying to get by with more moral ambiguity), comfort (You don't feel anything your character does, so giving doesn't cost you anything), and opportunity cost (You can only play what the game has to offer, so might as well see what those offerings are). The biggest reason Good is easy is because the character is empowered and proactive.

 

[Sgt Pepper]

People have often talked up Bioware games for the "moral choices" but I've always found them a bit shallow. In KOTOR I still remember a dialogue option where the obvious evil choice was basically a juvenile insult.

Skyrim did quite well, in that rather than good or bad, killing some NPCs would simply result in people coming after you for it. More subtle, along the lines of Do what you want but there may be consequences.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

"Though even Molyneux couldn't resist including the traditional black and white good/evil structure. "
Uh, what did you expect from the guy who made TWO games called "Black&White" just before he made Fable? :O

Anyway, I like that the bad options are always so extreme. That at least makes them INTERESTING.
Because as you say, the good options are always so very, very bland.

 

[K12]

I think straight forward morality metres work fine in a world where it makes sense for them to exist. In a fantasy world with a Godlike entity who would keep track of you (and even then it'd basically be a "pious" or "heretical" divide)

I think the problem is that in a video game world (excluding MMOs) it is perfectly appropriate to be a psychopath because it is actually the case that only you matter. The other people don't have feelings so even a good decision is a selfish egocentric one.

 

[Azuaron]

For a morality system done right, look at Dishonored.

It's mostly based around, "How many people did you literally murder this level?" As the bodies pile up, the plague gets worse and worse, rats start hunting in giant packs, and the last level is completely different based on whether your companions think you're ultimately a hero or a monster.

 

[Nick Holmgren]

[quote ="CHRIS RIO"]The civilians should be directly in your way. Make them clog up the roads when you're trying to get by. Make them rely on you for everything, to the point that they become entitled and arrogant. Make some of them turn on you, and then you have to decide if you want to fry one as an example to the others (they toy with this a little, but it doesn't go far enough). That's the superhero game I want to see.[/quote]

Oh god, no. That would be a horrible morality system. Sure, make being evil easier, but don't make being good just a pain in the butt. If you save people they should be grateful. Maybe the boss has more HP, or you have to avoid taking advantage of him when you could attack him through some civilians or something, but adopting the marvel universe "civilians are dicks" model would just make it never feel worth it.

Yes, a more nuanced system would be nice, but making it so being good sucks is not the way to do it.

The better way to handle it is "hey, on your way to save the day, there is a puppy about to be burned in a huge oven, wanna climb through it to get the puppy out"? Good stops being the default and evil can be justified. Bioshock could have done something similar: make it so you do not kill little sisters but instead just harvest some ADAM when you pick the bad option, messing up the little girl mentally a bit but not killing them. Each time you choose either to free or reap them you have to kill the Big Daddy. Then make the vita chambers cost ADAM. You get a worse and worse ending the more you farm the little sisters, but you can get literally every power and have infinity lives. You just have to be a bastard.

 

[Ruisu]

For a morality system done right, look at Dishonored.

It's mostly based around, "How many people did you literally murder this level?" As the bodies pile up, the plague gets worse and worse, rats start hunting in giant packs, and the last level is completely different based on whether your companions think you're ultimately a hero or a monster.

The best part about Dishonored's morality system is that it doesn't really measures how "good" or "evil" you were, but how much chaos you caused to the city around you as you completed your objectives. It never really judges Corvo as a villain because he chose to kill a whole lot of people, or because he got detected while being loud killing everyone. Instead, you are always a hero, no matter your ending, but the consequences of your action in the city determine if it will be a peaceful, plague free city, or a chaotic, plague ridden city.

I say this mostly because of how many different choices you have on how to interact with your objectives. A lot of them are not "good" or "bad" choices. Like when you have to kill the High Overseer, you can change the poisoned glass and watch him die from afar (Or not watch at all, just leave and get the blackbook later), or use it to kill both him and the witness, or spill the glasses and kill him in other way. And even then, just to make the choice of killing him with your own hands for revenge's sake (my thoughs when I killed him"), or doing it in a safe way, from afar or any other choice.
Every single choice you make in Dishonored, even if it's not highlighted as one, counts to what kind of characther you believe Corvo is, and how much you care about the consequences of your action.
Yahtzee complained about Corvo being a silent protagonist, but the truth is that with so many option to mold him, it would be too hard to make all the different possible personalities Corvo could had in the game.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

This is what CD Project understands better than other developers. It's not about morality, it's about choices and consequences. No one goes around doing evil things because they like being evil. Making a consciously evil choice when a better alternative is obvious to you is something that doesn't happen in life and shouldn't happen in video games either. People do evil things for two reasons: because they are not aware that they're doing something evil and because they don't care as long as they get what they want.

 

[Mortuorum]

I've been gaming on Xbox Live for quite a while now (I was a beta tester on the original Xbox) and what I have experienced there leads me to believe that there probably are gamers out there who would murder an actual real-world puppy if (1) it could be done with no actual effort on their part (say, by a button press); (2) it could be done anonymously; and (3) there were no personal consequences.

But I'm a cynical bastard.

(Heh: Captcha is "Switch to Time Warner Cable." Can you blame me for being cynical?)

 

[KaZuYa]

Most morale choice systems are just lazy programing, instead of keeping track of each choice or decision and having individual NPC's reacting to each situation in a considered way you just get points in either a Saint or Asshole meter and their reaction or your actions are rolled against them. Evil or Good are not black(red)and white(blue) I mean if you saw an NPC brutally beat and choke another to death that would rightly be seen as evil, then you find out the murdered NPC killed and raped the sister of the first NPC in the most sadistic and painful way possible and you then see that action is an understandable light, it's the old putting a pacifist in a room with Hitler and handing them a gun setup.

What I'm trying to say is any choice should be open but it's underlying motivation and personal consequences which affect the morality of it and that is difficult to code in a game.

You have absolutely ZERO concept of game design or coding... Not to mention a concept of what you're talking about, do you?

Most morale choices aren't lazy programming, it's simple programming. It's a basic 0/1 on/off switch. What you are ignorantly stating is that people shouldn't use a basic programming principal.


No, the REAL issue is the writing. Most games aren't written to be morally ambiguous. Coding has no part whatsoever in this, as it falls solely on the writers and the universe to accommodate it. Good job on jumping straight to the painfully stereotypical and much, muuuuuch more lazy "Hitler" comparison though, instead of actually trying to make a decent statement.

A decent example, on the other hand, would be Mass Effect. It does a decent enough job of remaining somewhat ambiguous throughout the first two games, but the third game manages to screw it all up. It takes Renegade and Paragon, and turns them into "Wrong" and "Right". Every renegade action taken up to that point in the game actually weakens you - robbing you of your numerical score for the end game through either losing a chance for them, or negating it completely. Whereas all the Paragon choices, on the other hand, serve solely to increase said score.

As far as I have seen, renegade choices never beat out paragon choices in score. That is terribly handling on Bioware's part. Coding does not come into that at all, the writing however does as well as those handling the design of the game. Again, coding no, design and writing yes.

Simple?

1) I was using Mass effect as the example see the red and blue in brackets, I just didn't openly mention it so I didn't attract random flamers (job failed.)

2) What the whole point of my post was, is a million things can affect every single NPC in a million different ways, each working against and with each other on varying levels it's the same in real life. Everyone has personal motivation and for games like Mass Effect to really be a morale sand box you would need to make so many variable paths the game would take a staggeringly insane time to make reguardless what the writers do plot wise. Game developers who want to have a morale choice system will take the lazy option and slap in a "good choice, evil choice" meter hence it being lazy (so by taking the option to code a simple system I was calling them lazy) =)

 

[Lightknight]

I think the author's point isn't that moral choice has no place in games, it's that it shouldn't be a mechanic. If I read it right, the idea is that imposing restrictions and visibly tracking what's "good" and what's "evil" kinda defeats the point of having the kind of tough choices to make, because it removes the complexity and difficulty from the choice.

So the measurement of morality is what the author wants to get rid of?

If anything, that would just be shoving the measures behind the scenes where a formula figures it out to render the ramifications of one's actions behind the scenes.

A "meter" is not the problem. Scales of morality have been around since the dawn of human theology. From Egyptian to modern day cultures we've literally always had a concept of people whose good outweighs their bad and vice versa.

If you or the author dislike a quantified morality stat then that's your opinion. There is nothing objectively wrong with it otherwise and I quite like it in the games I've had it.

Murdering innocents. Stealing from the poor for no justifiable reason (like you being even more poor). Rape. Puppie punching. Kitten stomping, etc.

Saving innocents. Assisting the poor. Saving a girl from a rapist. Not punching puppies or stomping kittens, etc.

Relative morality is bollocks in all the big areas. There absolutely are some socially stable absolutes where morality is concerned even if a minority of people go against it.

Now, there are grey areas. Like theft from the rich to feed your family or something. The action of theft itself remains evil but the argument is moreso that the justification outweighs the bad. That it would be more evil to allow your children to starve to death when you had a less evil alternative to save them. But that doesn't make theft good.

In a lot of the more simplistic moral choice mechanics the good and bad sides are obvious.

Really? So there is no such thing as doing a bad thing for the right reasons or "end justifies the means"? With the proper contextual situation I could make any of your "good" actions "bad" and any of your "bad" actions "good". So I would argue that relativistic morality is the only thing that actually exists.

Please read the section from my post you quoted that I have now bolded. It directly discusses your objection to my comment.

The basis being that actions are generally stable evils or goods. Stealing, murder, and rape are always wrong but for some of them an appropriate amount of moral justification may make it a greater evil not to commit the actions. Stealing to feed dying children does not make it less wrong to steal from someone but the alternative of letting children starve to death when you could do something about it is a greater evil. This is how immoral actions are deemed justified. The scale tips to the side of an ethical action when not doing it would be worse.

The concept of subjective morality misses this point. It places far too much emphasis on individual morality as opposed to social and cultural morality which is subject to change.

 

[Sarge034]

Please read the section from my post you quoted that I have now bolded. It directly discusses your objection to my comment.

The basis being that actions are generally stable evils or goods. Stealing, murder, and rape are always wrong but for some of them an appropriate amount of moral justification may make it a greater evil not to commit the actions. Stealing to feed dying children does not make it less wrong to steal from someone but the alternative of letting children starve to death when you could do something about it is a greater evil. This is how immoral actions are deemed justified. The scale tips to the side of an ethical action when not doing it would be worse.

The concept of subjective morality misses this point. It places far too much emphasis on individual morality as opposed to social and cultural morality which is subject to change.

I did read it several times because it was a well thought out point. The thing is that I believe everything you said has proven my point. The fact that one thing can influence the perception of another is the definition of relativity. Think about it like this, if there was a hard line moralist then both the actions of stealing the food and letting the innocent children starve would be morally unacceptable. However, the act of stealing the food would be worse than letting the innocent children starve through inaction because one is a willful action and the other is willful inaction. Where as a moral relativist would normally say "stealing is wrong", but when faced with the prospect of innocent children starving it becomes "stealing is right in this situation". That was the basis of my claim that only moral relativism truly exists.

Another thing that might be worth examining is that you say "children" while I specify "innocent children". I do not believe the act of killing children or simply letting them die is a morally wrong act. As with everything else the situation determines that. The child soldiers in Africa who rape, murder, and plunder do not receive the same moral standing as their victims in my eyes and as such I have no problem when a militia, village, or any other force utilizes deadly force against them.

 

[aramisx]

You bring up morality systems, even mention BioWare in the Facebook post for this article, but you don't even mention a game under BW's charge that actually does morality systems right?

SWTOR might be an MMO and a perpetual game, but the Light Side and Dark Side choices you make DO make a difference on your experience in the game (not to mention the aesthetics of your character). Have you played a Sith and chosen only light side options? It changes your story progression, a few encounters, and achievements of your toon and that's just one of many examples.

Maybe morality systems are hard to pull of in a linear pre-determined storyline, but there are some places where it does work.

 

[Chosen_Chaos]

Minor nitpick - the reputation system in Fallout: New Vegas isn't new; it was part of Fallout 2 and (I think) the original Fallout as well.

And as for Mass Effect, while there are Paragon/Renegade choices that are massively obvious, there are others that aren't quite so obvious (that I recall, anyway). Also, while the "give Tali a hug" Paragon interrupt might have been one that probably caused a few mouse buttons to be broken by even the most hardcore Renegade Shepard, there was a Renegade interrupt on Tuchunka that even people who were going for an otherwise pure Paragon run should have chosen.

But, as other people have said, the issue isn't morality systems themselves, but rather poorly implemented morality systems. One way around might be not to make the consequences of your choice immediately obvious. For example, a decision might seem to have a bad immediate outcome, but later down the track, good outcomes start to become apparent, and vice versa.