F1irst P0sting and a Moral Conundrum

Well here it is. Blog #Umpteen-billion. For those of you who are new to the site (read: all of you) this blog will be dedicated to games, game design, and the partaking of games with a special focus on improving what the industry's got going. Without further ado, let's make a better fun.

The Problem:

The topic of today's discussion will be the ever contentious, and increasingly popular: MORAL CHOICE SYSTEM. For those of you who missed out on the revolutionary, and popular Knights of the Old Republic, and have had their head in a hole for the past few years, a moral choice system is when the player is allowed to decide how their characters act and respond to the conditions around them. For some games this has meant allowing players to chose between good and evil, or given them the power to affect every conversation that they have. Sounds cool right?

Now we come to our problem. A player's choice often boils down to choosing between normal human being (good) or hopelessly psychotic devil creature (evil). Don't get me wrong, there's room for psychosis in games. Some of my favorite characters are psychotic, but I've found them to be poor subjects for moral choice systems. I can't imagine Kratos deciding between disemboweling the minotaur or rescuing the poor Athenian child. Psychotic people you see, have no subtlety, and we need our choices in games to be subtle.

The greatest failing of KOTOR was, without a doubt, it's evil moral choices. The whole point of the Dark Side in Star Wars was that it slowly consumed you, that you believed that you were doing the right thing, while letting your anger and fear envelope your mind, dragging you ever deeper into the hell you had created for yourself. KOTOR had none of that nuance. You stepped out into the world and immediately began slaughtering innocents, mistreating your allies, and acting like an overall prick. This makes both for poor character development and makes taking the Dark Side path a choice that you have to make right away as opposed to making it as the game develops.

The good decisions are often no better. Mass Effect, a more recent proponent of the moral choice system, kept you as the hero regardless of your decisions, but supposedly had NPCs react to you differently based on whether you were Paragon or Renegade. My issue with this system was that it was too easy to be good. Trusting people and risking your life to save the innocent usually worked out, and, on the off chance that someone decided to kill you, you could gun them down without a thought. This bugged me. If I went around trusting all of the gun-toting, crime-committing, crazies in the world, I would rapidly become dead, so why do my videogame heroes get away with being so bloody stupid? I don't want my moral decision to be between raving lunatic and dumbass.

The Solutions:

First we need to ask ourselves the big question, why a moral choice system? Games seem to be obsessed with the idea of moral choice over just plain old choice. Furthermore, they love to assign arbitrary values to each decision a character makes. Why should saving a small child give me ten goodliness points? And why should letting that selfsame child die earn me ten badliness points? I can understand developers having background meters on a player's morality in order to affect how other characters react to them, but why have those values visible to the player? To solve our problem I'm going to use a theoretical game scenario. The player character and their friends have gone camping. They got cut off from society when their car broke down, and now they have to survive in the wilderness while working their way back towards civilization. Let's say that your character and an acquaintance, let's call him Bob, are running from an angry bear. As you come to the banks of a river that you can cross to safety Bob trips over a log. Do you:

a) leave Bob and save yourself?
b) help Bob up and try to get both of you to safety?
c) distract the bear with manly posturing so that Bob can escape?

All of these options make a certain amount of sense, and all will have consequences later in the game. We'll start with option a). Bob collapses, and you continue to run, fording the river, and getting to safety. Bob doesn't make it. At this point most games would award you with a helping of evil points, but I'm going to keep that out of this scenario. Instead, your character is going to have to return to camp and explain to the rest of the group how Bob died, and you will have to attempt to survive with one less person in the group. But, you came out of the situation unharmed.

Option b) could very well end with both of you being mauled, but maybe you can both make it back to camp injured for the rest of the game, but alive. Saving Bob with manly posturing will, let's be honest here, most likely end with you being mauled and having some permanent game-affecting status debuff. But, that's all part of what comes into a choice system. Instead of the game telling you that you're an evil character, or a good character, it'll be forcing you to play through the consequences of your actions. For these consequences to come into full effect of course, games need to develop a system of persistent punishment and reward that will have a significant impact on your gaming experience.

And hey, we could even have you make those choices while still in full control of your character, instead of selecting an option in a dialogue box.

We will discuss consequences and a truly persistent world next time with: The Threat of Death.