tl,dr summary below this poorly written wall of text
I was wondering how many role playing (or whatever genre, really) games actually challenged the players by presenting several options when it comes to your character's morality. Most western RPGs (don't know about JRPGs) give you a choice between idealistic papa jesus, or a psycho/sociopath douchebag ************ who's a combination of dick cheney and dr. evil.
The consequences of your choice of moral archetype are also plain: on one hand, acting like mother Theresa throughout the game gets you all the nicest, hottest girls, phat lewts, and makes the world a better place to live in as you painstakingly solve every single quest in the game the 'good' way, rescuing everybody's kittens, feeding and freeing enslaved orphans, defeating the big bad dragon/mage/sentient spaceship/personal demon, etc.
On the other hand, playing through the game as Samuel Jackson often has you behaving inconsistently, as if you can't decide if you're simply an apathetic sociopath who couldn't care less about the other pixels and just wants shit to end, a kleptomaniac mercenary dude who loves money, or a fucked up megalomaniac sadist who drinks widows' tears. One moment you're justifiably intensely ruthless as the 'anti-hero', but choosing the anti-hero option in the game's climax has you suddenly, for instance, do something unreasonably 'evil' like kill your own cat or nuke a city. Acting like the anti-hero consequently leaves you with the most unsatisfying conclusions to the game, leaving the world a crapsack place with a jaded/enslaved/utterly massacred population thanks to your apathy/cruelty. Also, playing the anti-hero/evil guy has you turn uglier and meaner, your skin becomes scarred or darker, and you glow red.
Now, I'm not complaining about how video games only give you about two real ways to go through things, or how satisfying/unsatisfying the consequences of your moral choices are (the way many anti-hero playthroughs result in an inconsistent protagonist upsets me a little, but that's another issue).
I only wanted to discover what games offered grey and gray morality scenarios, where morality issues do not really present the players with an obvious right/good or wrong/evil solution.
A recently released RPG, 'the Witcher 2' had an overabundance of these events, and I consequently enjoyed the game despite its draconian interface, hour long potion drinking animations and boring dark fantasy setting and bad voice acting and only one ultimate (though satisfying) ending. Even though you got the same ultimate ending with each playthrough with the ladybug and the view of that city, the experiences you go through to achieve that ending varied so much according to how you approached the game. The game never chastised you for your moral choices since there were no truly objective moral decisions to be made in that game; you may get punished for not picking the most prudent dialogue options and that's it. In my multiple playthroughs of the game, all of the moral decisions made by me through the game have impacted the gameplay (different people in the dead book, different companions, different animated custcenes) and yet all of the options seemed valid according to the moral perspective you held; I never felt like a good guy or Darth Vader in the game.
tl,dr: what video games present the player with scenarios that challenge the player with complex moral decisions?
I was wondering how many role playing (or whatever genre, really) games actually challenged the players by presenting several options when it comes to your character's morality. Most western RPGs (don't know about JRPGs) give you a choice between idealistic papa jesus, or a psycho/sociopath douchebag ************ who's a combination of dick cheney and dr. evil.
The consequences of your choice of moral archetype are also plain: on one hand, acting like mother Theresa throughout the game gets you all the nicest, hottest girls, phat lewts, and makes the world a better place to live in as you painstakingly solve every single quest in the game the 'good' way, rescuing everybody's kittens, feeding and freeing enslaved orphans, defeating the big bad dragon/mage/sentient spaceship/personal demon, etc.
On the other hand, playing through the game as Samuel Jackson often has you behaving inconsistently, as if you can't decide if you're simply an apathetic sociopath who couldn't care less about the other pixels and just wants shit to end, a kleptomaniac mercenary dude who loves money, or a fucked up megalomaniac sadist who drinks widows' tears. One moment you're justifiably intensely ruthless as the 'anti-hero', but choosing the anti-hero option in the game's climax has you suddenly, for instance, do something unreasonably 'evil' like kill your own cat or nuke a city. Acting like the anti-hero consequently leaves you with the most unsatisfying conclusions to the game, leaving the world a crapsack place with a jaded/enslaved/utterly massacred population thanks to your apathy/cruelty. Also, playing the anti-hero/evil guy has you turn uglier and meaner, your skin becomes scarred or darker, and you glow red.
Now, I'm not complaining about how video games only give you about two real ways to go through things, or how satisfying/unsatisfying the consequences of your moral choices are (the way many anti-hero playthroughs result in an inconsistent protagonist upsets me a little, but that's another issue).
I only wanted to discover what games offered grey and gray morality scenarios, where morality issues do not really present the players with an obvious right/good or wrong/evil solution.
A recently released RPG, 'the Witcher 2' had an overabundance of these events, and I consequently enjoyed the game despite its draconian interface, hour long potion drinking animations and boring dark fantasy setting and bad voice acting and only one ultimate (though satisfying) ending. Even though you got the same ultimate ending with each playthrough with the ladybug and the view of that city, the experiences you go through to achieve that ending varied so much according to how you approached the game. The game never chastised you for your moral choices since there were no truly objective moral decisions to be made in that game; you may get punished for not picking the most prudent dialogue options and that's it. In my multiple playthroughs of the game, all of the moral decisions made by me through the game have impacted the gameplay (different people in the dead book, different companions, different animated custcenes) and yet all of the options seemed valid according to the moral perspective you held; I never felt like a good guy or Darth Vader in the game.
tl,dr: what video games present the player with scenarios that challenge the player with complex moral decisions?
