The Morality System in Games Has Outlived Its Usefulness

[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.

 

[Chris Rio]

Hey there!

So I'm dumb and didn't notice that this got posted until now, but I wanted to say thanks for reading my words, and I'm glad it started a lively discussion. It looks like there's some for and against, and some grey matter in the middle, so...cool! I'm kinda late but if I'm gonna read through the comments and see if there is anything else I wanna add that hasn't been said before.

Thanks!
Chris R.

 

[gridsleep]

Kill the puppy/don't kill the puppy is different from save the puppy/let the puppy die. Willfully killing an innocent animal is shades darker than merely leaving it be. But risking one's life to save a puppy from drowning is more on a level of watching it drown as you stand by in front of witnesses who may or may not agree with your choice. I am reminded of the puppy arc from Apocalypse Now! In the worst of situations that can only get worse as time goes by, the tiny shred of humanity that is left in you will scream for some kind of expression just to let the world know that it is still there. Murdering a family of people in terrified panic and then rescuing a puppy shows just how insane humans can be, and how only we can fully understand and appreciate the meaning behind our own insanity.

 

[immortalfrieza]

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.

What I liked most about the morality system in Dishonored is that the options are all satisfying no matter what you choose to do. My favorite options for the choices presented in Dishonored tend to be the "good" or rather nonchaotic options. For the above situation the option of branding the High Overseer with the Heretic's Brand and thus completely destroying his life is brilliant because the guy is such a massively evil and hypocritical dick that he probably deserves it, and it's also morally ambiguous (sure you've spared his life but it's also been ruined) so it's much more satisfying than simply offing the guy.

Something that I think is lacking in morality systems is a sense of satisfaction and relevance of the choices, which is something Dishonored excels at. Most of the time one tends not to really care about the morality of the choices made because you don't know enough about the people involved to care, and there's no real reaction from the world around you to your choices including often the main ones besides the direct rewards and consequences after the choice his made, so you quickly forget about them before long even if for some reason you do care. Morality systems don't have to be filled with grey areas to be effective, but it does require context as to who it is you're helping or screwing over, as well as consequences and benefits after the fact, otherwise the choices lack any actual impact.