A new take on a morality system for a game

[Steve Dark]

Yes that's right, it's another "I thought up a great game mechanic!" thread. But this time, with a twist!

Comments, feedback, amendments, etc. are the whole reason I'm bothering the post this so please don't hold back, here's the idea.

Basically, the main problem I've seen with morality systems in games is that it leads to very inconsistent characters. You can be evil for years of game time and then decide to randomly save a puppy, and everyone instantly acts like you've been good this whole time. Also, a game has to allow for all eventualities which leads to everyone acting surprised when you take the final evil choice at the big finale even though you've been kicking puppies all the way through. What I propose is to take away a players direct control in making choices (hear me out), and let the character act the way the character feels. However, what the player has control of is the personality of the Character.
Say for example you have a few sliders. One perhaps with bravery one end and self preservation the other, one with serious to jokey, one with benevolent to psychotic etc. Now the character is a blank slate at the start with everything in the middle, and as he levels up or something, the player not only gets points to increase stats and whatnot but also is allowed to shift the sliders a bit and make the character's personality more defined.
Then, when a character is in a major situation say... a building is collapsing; A Brave, Jokey Psycho laughs dramatically and sets fire to someone trapped under rubble for fun before walking out slowly. Whereas a Cowardly, serious but a little benevolent type tries to help someone... for about 3 seconds and then runs for it leaving them to die with a heartfelt sorry as he goes.

So, thoughts? Practical idea? Deeply flawed? Going to revolutionise games as we know them?

(There was no twist to the thread, it was just a normal looky at my idea type, I lied to you. I'm so sorry.)

Oh, also yes I do realise that there is a high chance someone has come up with this idea before me. I hadn't heard of it anywhere though, would be interested to find out how it panned out if it has been tried.

 

[NickCaligo42]

You've identified exactly one problem with morality systems, which is a general issue in all of narrative choice regardless of morality. You've failed to address the myriad of other problems that come along with morality systems, IE: sense of dramatic weight and consequence, narrative consistency and integrity, and dissatisfying sense of personalization to the experience. All in all what you suggest sounds just as dissatisfying as the likes of inFamous, if not worse.

Here's the two fallacies developers commit when they build "morality" or "karma" systems based on a sliding scale of good versus evil:

1 - Karma has no weight as a rational factor. It's a metaphysical resource--if that--created for the sole purpose of supporting a morality-based narrative choice system, with no relevance to other factors in the game and no sense of risk/reward--risk being a vital element in the human decision-making process. Players simply earn points towards being good/evil as they go, like a karma magnet of some kind, with the rest of the game world assigning no actual value to the points that they accumulate. Sometimes these are tied to ingame elements, like powers that can be earned, but these are as risk-free as obtaining experience points. Generally speaking, unless the universe has gone out of its way to make good/evil points something tangible in-world, as with The Force in the Star Wars universe, karma systems just aren't interesting. Even then I'd call it a stretch as Dark/Light side points tend to lie outside the realm of other resources that the player and the rest of the world can ascribe tangible value to.

2 - Denial of personalization. There's a moment in Heavy Rain where Ethan Mars goes to the fridge, and he's got a choice of drinking beer or orange juice. While this has no bearing on the plot of Heavy Rain whatsoever, which one the player chooses to drink says a lot about how they're interpreting Ethan's character--but best of all, it's entirely up to them why he's picking the one he's picking. If we were putting this moment into, say, inFamous, the game would have to go out of its way contrive a reason for picking beer to be evil. "Watch out, Cole!" Zeke says, "if you drink that, seven kittens will DIE!" Not only is this patently ridiculous and extremely restrictive on the writers, it denies the myriad of reasons outside of being a reckless drunk that the player might choose to drink beer. Maybe they just like beer more.

Your system suggests all the same problems as I just listed, plus has the irritating side-effect of forcing the player to do actions they don't necessarily want to do. Generally speaking, morality is a poor platform to approach choice-making in games from.

 

[Veylon]

A key problem with this - or any morality system - is that people want "talkies", or games with spoken dialogue. For every scenario you are envisioning, someone has to script out a scene, produce dialogue, and then have it animated and voiced. Most morality games have two version of a scene: one where the character is good and one where he's evil. Ones where other characters are surprised that the previously good (or evil) character has suddenly gone and done something on the other end of the spectrum are generally ignored.

Now, some games - like KotoR - chop up every conversation into a hundred soundbites and string them together. This does allow for some, maybe even most, of the flexibility you are looking for. Again, though, it requires developers to piece together these dialogue trees and keep track of every possible permutation. There's a lot of complexity in putting together a decent morality system, which is why so many use the simple Karma meter.

 

[mirror's edgy]

I think that the problem, as stated above, is with the tired and predictable problem with one good solution and one evil solution. I think that Fallout 1 and 2 are excellent examples of games presenting the player with choices that make the player genuinely contrast their notions of morality and sympathies with various characters, along with with the potential gain in game.

Fallout (1 or 2) rarely mandates the player to interact with any settlements or secondary characters in pursuit of their ultimate goals, which is an excellent environment to present choices to the player, as they do not think "Alright, I have to pick one of the choices presented to me, or the game won't continue." Rather, the player can consider, "Alright, these characters (or factions) are conflicting and I can decide who my actions will benefit."

Almost every major choice and quest has a handful of solutions that the player can pursue, some of which are not always told to the player, and need to be discovered on their own. These choices (almost) never boil down to helping the good guy or screwing him over for your own needs. Many different groups vie for power in the world, and you can choose to support whoever you want.

My point being, the classic Fallout games presented a cast of characters who were always morally ambiguous. I won't describe all of them, but to put it simply, the player would benefit almost equally from any choice, and almost none were shown as "right" and "wrong." The various endings would show what long term impact the choices of the player made, sometimes showing that helping out all the nice people in town didn't help in the long run, or something else unexpected. I feel that I've been rambling, so let me simply say:

Fallout presented choices with little conventional moral clarity, letting the player make choices that were both intellectually stimulating and integral to gameplay, helping it achieve its status as a great RPG series.

 

[Sensenmann]

I think the real issue, as players see it is that it only effects appearance and ambient chatter. If actions had more consequences than who's in the endgame or x points, then the game could actually be shaped by karma actions.

Fallout 3 did this well, you could choose a shabby home or you could destroy the settlement and have a nice appartment and lots of money. Players knew they were being selfish and perhaps like a psychopath.
However, the game doesn't break if you destroy it, and the prominent quest by Moira is still available, so second time players can destroy for the boost, but get all these negative points even if they wanted to be good or neutral, but just wanted the best start.

Fable was always exactly what I explained in the first. I would have cared more about section in II where you become a slave guard, but the only important thing there was the fight, apart from leaving Albion for this, for which anything the player didn't care about was wiped out, or the choices already made stuck, which is good.

In Infamous 2, from what I've gathered from Ghostrobo's playthrough, you can only play one mission when given one bad and one good. So content gets blocked off, nessessitating a second playthrough.