Apparently I’m a nice guy. At least that’s what my trusty Pip-Boy 3000 (Model A) tells me. I’m glad it does this because I probably wouldn’t have known otherwise, what with people commenting on how nice a person I am or how much of a “goody two shoes” I’ve been. Fallout 3 is giving me a curious sense of déjà vu, I’ve had this experience before.
I was a bit more of an asshole in Mass Effect, but really the galaxy wasn’t going to save itself and the council seemed content to sit around all day talking and never take any action. I think a degree of bluntness was warranted. I was a Renegade, the game reliably informed me of that regardless of my own opinions on my actions. The game was making a judgement call on the kind of person it thought I was.
Dozens of titles have featured similar metrics for portraying good or evil, usually based on a Judeo-Christian view of morality. I appreciate the desire to allow for a range of player behaviours, and using the cultural mores of the western world makes a degree of sense given the perceived audience for such games. I become concerned when the game feels a need to tell me explicitly how good or evil it believes I have been; the issues I have with such systems are two fold.
My first problem is that the interface of the game is usually designed to represent my own knowledge of myself and my status. It describes my mental and physical state, the items I am carrying and any information I have gleamed during the course of the game. In that case shouldn’t the interface be as impartial as possible? In my life I have done things that others have not been happy with. I’ve often been caused to questioned my actions but ultimately the only guide for my morality are the reactions of others and my own conscience . I don’t have an internal meter telling me I’ve shifted 2 points towards the good side of the morality spectrum.
In their own mind I suspect most people consider themselves to be fairly decent, flawed yes, but neither paragons of virtue nor amoral villains. Even people who society as a whole would consider “evil” are likely to have their own motivations for their actions and not consider themselves in the same way others do. Everybody is the hero of their own story, we take the actions we do based on our own sense of morality influenced by our culture, upbringing and belief system.
For a game to offer choices of varying morality and then judge those choices seems counter productive. The relative morality of our choices is ultimately judged by the reactions of society, of the world around us and the people we meet; it is rarely known immediately and exactly.
My second issue is that by making player morality or karma, an interface element encourages an attitude of “playing the gauges” whereby players will make their decisions based not on a sense of role playing or what they view as right or wrong in a given situation but on which option will push them one way or the other on the great morality meter.
Games like Fallout 3 and Mass Effect already do a good job presenting a world and a cast of characters who react to your actions based on their own individual personalities do we really need dedicated interface elements telling us how the game itself (and by abstraction the developer) views our actions?
Games are about exploration and what is more powerful than exploring our own personality? This can’t be done on anything more than a surface level if the interface of the game itself is constantly making judgements about what kind of person it thinks we are.
7 replies on “A measure of morality.”
It is amazing to think how much of a hold pen-and-paper roleplaying still has on RPGs to this day. This sort of thing would have made sense in earlier times, but as we increasingly move away from dependence on the same models, it seems that with a game making these calculations for us, we can rid ourselves of it. However, you’ll always have your min/maxers who demand knowing what every stat is (and having complete control over it).
When I first started Fallout 3, I went in with the intent of creating a certain type of character. Quickly realizing I didn’t like this concept, I restarted and just played it as I felt the character’s personality would allow. Do you believe that a designer could implement this in a game without a large screaming match between him and the more involved gamers?
Should that stop him or her?
I believe such a system has been implemented before. I’m hesitant to say what the game was as I can’t remember for certain but I have a feeling it might have been Planetfall.
I think it could work without too provoking too many arguments if the designers didn’t make a big deal of the presence of a morality gauge at all and instead focused on how characters opinions of you changed based on your actions; basically putting all consequences in the world. Not only would that allow you to explore the type of person you were becoming but it would open up the possibilities for storytelling when specific characters reacted a certain way it would encourage you to try and find out why. If somebody disapproved strongly of you drinking alcohol might that be because they had an alcoholic parent, or maybe they themselves are and they don’t want their fate to befall you?
Taking the meter away would mean characters could react with more nuance to specific actions and not just your general morality.
I wonder if the tendency towards a quantifiable binary morality is the result of games creating a sense of personality for the gamer by simply providing them with trope characterization. ‘Fable II”s morality system is a perfect example of this. By quantifying your actions, it is easier for the player to map out how their character has progressed or how to create an evil/good character. Maybe game designers are still too hesitant to leave players to their own devices.
A great bunch of ideas in here. I’ve always thought that any system of measuring “good and evil” that includes stats and raw numbers inherently implies some absolutes about what is good and what is evil…
I also see sometimes that it’s really easy to be extremely one or the other in games like that – Fable 2 being so easy to be good as to be laughable (I mean -20 good points just for murdering your WIFE? Try 20 years in JAIL for a more appropriate response! ZOMG! Sorry gets me angry that one…).
Black & White, one of the prototypical good/evil games was perhaps an example of the opposite, where it was too easy to be evil, and while that probably could make an interesting statement about the world and morality, instead it was just a result of buggy code and imbalanced game mechanics.
I don’t mind morality being numbered any more than I mind health, strength, luck, etc. being numbered. If a game was going to do away with those indicators they should do away with all of them. I’m not sure how many people would still consider it a role-playing game at that point, though, at least not in the narrowly defined definition.
Luck is the iffy one, but in terms of health and strength they are supposed to represent a characters innate knowledge about the capabilities and status of their own body.
We all have an idea of how “well” we feel and how “strong” we are, but Karma is supposedly representing the world’s perception of your actions. Which is highly subjective and something we are generally unaware of.
Great post, it mirrors a lot of my own thinking lately. I also notice that we’re all starting to talk about videogames as being limited in how we represent moral choice. Bioshock’s much touted kill/save dynamic is a good example of the binary and therefore not realistic choices most games give us. Fable II has some interesting range along the good/evil paradigm, but also sees good and evil as something we can judge by looks alone.
What I really find fascinating is that we’re discussing these games as if we think they SHOULD be realistic. I haven’t read a blog post complaining about the limited choices of careers in a game of Life. This medium aspires to be realistic, in both visual and interaction modes. It’s kind of fascinating to see the hope we all have that games can be much much more than just “entertainment,” and how far we’ve come from that Board Game of Life.