Ethical choices in gaming

[Black Reaper]

Moral choices in gaming are bullshit, if you know what you want, there isn't actually a choice, as there is a clear "good" and "evil" option, it is basically a dick measuring contest, in the sense that it is there simply to see how much of a dick can you be

Meanwhile, ethical choices are interesting, they are basically(according to my mother) choosing from 2 evils, instead of an evil and good choice, so instead of donating to some orphans vs burning the orphanage down, it`s saving the orphans, but sentencing them to a life of slavery vs not saving them

I hope you got what i meant, as i am as good at expressing myself as my cat is at Dragon slaying

Basically, there is no set "good" value, so you have to choose the lesser among the 2 evils

For some strange reasons, there are more moral choices than ethical ones, that's why i made this thread

So, can you think of any?

Spoiler: My own example, also Fate/Stay Night and Nier sopilers

One thing i liked in Fate/Stay Night's Heaven's Feel route(apart from the sheer badassness in it) was a choice you get in the middle

Basically, there is a girl whose crime is simply existing, her mere existence will cause people to die, but this isn't her fault, so you can kill an innocent girl for the sake of the world, or let her live and condemn many others

Another thing i loved about this was the protagonist's development after this, before this, the protagonist wanted to become a superhero, a hero of justice, but he realizes he would be a hypocrite if he continued to believe that, so if you choose to spare her, the protagonist abandons the ideals he had since childhood, this paragraph doesn't capture the beauty of it

The other thing i can think of are the last 2 endings in Nier, a major character is dying, and you can save her life in exchange for yours, what that means is you have to delete your save data to save her, you can only get this ending on repeat playtroughs of the game, so it is unlikely that you'll save her because you are sick of this game and never want to touch it again

Actually, Nier has many of these(like the lighthouse lady), this is just the one i thought of first

 

[madwarper]

Well, there is ME2's choice about the Geth Heretics.

Spoiler

You could send a pulse to either destroy the Heretics or forcefully rewrite their program so they'd stop helping the Reapers.

While the choice is indeed between 2 evils, BioWare had to ruin it by arbitrary attributing one to Paragon and the other to Renegade.

 

[KarmaTheAlligator]

In the Fallout 3 DLC the Pit, you have two choices:

Spoiler

help free the slaves by kidnapping the slaver's child, but doom the population to a bleak future as they succumb to a deadly disease ravaging their ranks right now (because while the freed slave keep doing the research, they know nothing about it and have to start from scratch), or help the slaver, who actually knows what he's doing and has a great long term plan for the city, free of the disease as he is doing research on his own kid who happens to be immune, while keeping the current slave population intact and still in slavery.

The whole thing comes down to either short or long term benefits, and which is which is not immediately clear, especially how they're presented at first.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Mass Effect 3's choice about whether to cure the genophage or not was a really good example in my opinion.

Spoiler

I think killing Mordin and not curing the genophage was the ethical choice because you need as many scientists as you can get working on The Crucible as that's the only thing that can possibly stop the Reapers. Yeah, you don't know what it does or how it works or if it will work, but there is literally no other way to stop the Reapers. It's obvious that you can't win a normal war vs the Reapers so how is curing the Krogans going to be helpful because the currently living adult Krogans are the only ones that can help in this war. Plus, not curing the genophage nets you both the Salarian scientists and Krogan support in the war. If you do cure the genophage and you didn't get the Salarian scientists, what if one of those Salarian scientists makes the breakthrough and is instrumental in figuring out how The Crucible works? Curing the Krogans doesn't mean anything if the Reapers kill all the races plus if you do defeat the Reapers, you can get someone back working on that cure even if they have to start from scratch. Obviously, everyone knows how the story goes now, but at the time in the game and with the information you had at the time, not curing the genophage was the best choice.

BioWare had to ruin it by arbitrary attributing one to Paragon and the other to Renegade.

My main issue with the Paragon and Renegade decisions were that there was always a nice way and bad way to do things. There's people where you have to go the bad/renegade route to deal with them and get what you need, they just don't respond to the nice way.

Spoiler: Concerning the Quarians and Geth in ME3

Maybe when you tell that Quarian commander to stand down and not fire on the Geth in ME3, the only way to get him to do it is by being a dick and telling him you'll fire on him if he indeeds fires on the Geth. If you go the paragon route, he will fire on the Geth no matter what. I would've like to see stuff like that where you had to be a renegade at times and had to be paragon at times.

 

[endtherapture]

The Witcher 2 has hundreds of ethical decisions, each with no right or wrong answer.

 

[omegaweopon]

Spoiler: Fable: The guard and his brother

Basically, there's a guard. He asks you to find, and kill his brother who is a bandit. The brother, when you attempt to kill him, informs you that the guard had killed their mother, and that he probably pointed him out, so as to remove the person who knows of the crime. You have to choose which one to kill. The guard, because he's a murderer, even though he has a long reputation of being a really good guard, and saving people, or the bandit, who was innocent in this, but is still a bandit.

 

[Happiness Assassin]

Ethical decisions can be done quite well in games. It is just when they attach a meter to it when it gets fucked up, because then at that point you aren't weighing the decisions and the consequences they have on characters, all you see is that +1 good point go up. At that point your own personal opinion on whether something is the right decision means jack shit, as the game has already gone and made up your mind for you and decided which is right and wrong.

There are numerous examples of games that get this wrong, but I am going to point out two games for different reasons: the Mass Effect series and KotOR 2.

ME: Granted that its moral choice system isn't strictly good/bad, it still has all the problems of defining the actual morality of the choices for you. But the worse thing about the morality system in ME is the way it tied into the conversation wheel. Because a specific section of the wheel was tied to a predetermined morality, players are conditioned to pick each option based on its position on the wheel, not the actual content of the choice. I can't count how many times I have heard people complain about missing something, not realizing that they had the choice the entire time. ME2 was especially bad at this for 1 reasons: the optimal results of some encounters were only possible by playing to the extremes of the morality scale, disincentiving playing a more neutral character, severely hampering the RP aspect of the game.

KotOR 2: A great game narrative that weaves a story of moral grayness in an otherwise stark black and white universe... too bad the game mechanics are telling you the exact opposite. No meaningful or even petty decision in the game is really free from blue/red morality meter, meaning that whatever you thought on the matter of whether something was right or not is meaningless... the game has made up your mind for you. That and the fact that some of the best stat bonuses and experiences in the game (like Ludo Kressh's tomb) can not be experienced without play to one extreme or another. KotOR one doesn't have this problem, as they are playing into a world with a previously established morality system and adding to it. KotOR 2 is asking you to think beyond this with its story, but it isn't willing to back it up with its mechanics. I remain convinced that the only reason it even had a morality system in the game was as a hold over from KotOR 1 and, in my opinion, it would have been a better game with themes that encompass all it's aspects.

 

[Callie]

It isnt always just good and evil, the paths can just be for different plot development/random (thinking of FarCry3 and the last choice you make isnt exactly good or evil or make any difference whatsoever)

 

[Guy from the 80's]

Moral choices in gaming are bullshit, if you know what you want, there isn't actually a choice, as there is a clear "good" and "evil" option, it is basically a dick measuring contest, in the sense that it is there simply to see how much of a dick can you be

Nay. Games like KOTOR and Mass Effect gives you the option to either go full sith or full paragon. Personally I find both rewarding. When I play badguy I relish it, but the same goes for good guy.

Also, those games also give you the option to chose neutral answers. (not good or bad)

 

[Elementary - Dear Watson]

I prefer this when it is not a choice, but part of the story.

Enslaved: Oddessy to the West had a good example of this.

Spoiler: Enslaved Story

You start by escaping a ship which appeared to have enslaved you.. and you escape the guards that are brainwashed with devices on their heads. Everyone else on the ship were in a state of induced coma, also with devices on.
You then fight your way through the post-apocalyptic world, destroying slavers, and eventually leading an attack on the place miles away from civilisation where all the last living people were being taken.
When you get there, however, you find why they were taken. They are not slaves at all, but they are being 'saved' from living in the post apocalyptic environment by living in an induced coma and having images of a beautiful happy life fed into their minds. When the main character sees the images, he is enthralled by them... and prefers it to living in the wasteland... but the other protagonist destroys the whole system to 'save' everone herself... the story ends with the main character questioning whether they did the right thing, and the future of all the people being completely uncertain... (We don't know if they can be revived)
Great Ending!

 

[KarmaTheAlligator]

ME: Granted that its moral choice system isn't strictly good/bad, it still has all the problems of defining the actual morality of the choices for you. But the worse thing about the morality system in ME is the way it tied into the conversation wheel. Because a specific section of the wheel was tied to a predetermined morality, players are conditioned to pick each option based on its position on the wheel, not the actual content of the choice. I can't count how many times I have heard people complain about missing something, not realizing that they had the choice the entire time. ME2 was especially bad at this for 1 reasons: the optimal results of some encounters were only possible by playing to the extremes of the morality scale, disincentiving playing a more neutral character, severely hampering the RP aspect of the game.

Yeah, ME's system was annoying. To remedy that, I cheated to give me full Paragon and Renegade bars, and then played how I wanted. Take that 'moral choice', I want my RP back.

 

[The Madman]

Witcher 2 most recently had some excellent decisions that needed to be made. The entire end of Chapter 2 stands out to me as a situation where I really was torn on what to do, especially if you sided with Roche earlier on which itself was a well done choice.

Do I let this character get their revenge for what is undeniably a horrific event for which this other character totally deserves to pay for... or do I let said evil person live knowing that in the long term it's entirely possible that their brand of 'evil' is exactly what might be needed. Or maybe things really would be better with them gone?

It's a tough decision. In the end I went with the ol' Witcher proverb of 'fuck em all, I'll just stand by my friends for better or worse'.

 

[Fractral]

Shin Megami Tensei games do this reasonably well. Most of them involve you having to side with a particular side in whatever war is going on at the time, but rather than the sides having good, neutral and evil alignments, they instead have law, neutral and chaos alignments, which means that the choice is often a lot less clear cut. In devil survivor 2 for example, the (sort of) chaos ending involves setting up a meritocracy system with almost absolute freedom within the meritocratic system, while the law ending is creating the perfect socialist society, but with very little freedom, to the point that it is implied that the inhabitants would have their minds rewritten to want to help others. Neither of these seems to be particularly better than the other to me, but I couldn't deny that these systems would work, which is sort of the point of MegaTen games- the old world is dead, what are you going to do with the new world?
Nocturne is very good for this. 6 endings, and aside from one ending which is supposed to be the bad ending, they more or less all seem pretty much equal. (although most people seem to choose neutral or TDE)

 

[TheRaggedQueen]

Ah, Nocturne. Ironically, Nocturne was the only main series game in the SMT series to -not- feature the Law, Neutral, Chaos thing. You had three different ideologies, combined with the one that puts everything back the way it was, the demon ending, and the true demon ending. None of which is ever really presented in a bad way, really, except for arguably the demon ending.

For the most part, I believe that we shouldn't harp too much on the ethical choices presented in older games, which I mean back from the beginning of 2000 up until...mm...I'd say about 2007. The thing about introducing morality and ethical dilemmas into games is that there will almost always be a choice the devs didn't think of that a gamer did, or even if the dev thought of it, the potential repercussions of such a choice combined with the limits of the system they were working with meant that they couldn't fit such a thing into it. Thus, we were shoehorned into good and evil, with only the occasional game allowing us to take a more complex path. As tech rolls on, I think we're beginning to lose a lot of the excuses developers might have previously had for not introducing more in-depth moral choices into games.

 

[Sutter Cane]

Ethical decisions can be done quite well in games. It is just when they attach a meter to it when it gets fucked up, because then at that point you aren't weighing the decisions and the consequences they have on characters, all you see is that +1 good point go up. At that point your own personal opinion on whether something is the right decision means jack shit, as the game has already gone and made up your mind for you and decided which is right and wrong.

There are numerous examples of games that get this wrong, but I am going to point out two games for different reasons: the Mass Effect series and KotOR 2.

ME: Granted that its moral choice system isn't strictly good/bad, it still has all the problems of defining the actual morality of the choices for you. But the worse thing about the morality system in ME is the way it tied into the conversation wheel. Because a specific section of the wheel was tied to a predetermined morality, players are conditioned to pick each option based on its position on the wheel, not the actual content of the choice. I can't count how many times I have heard people complain about missing something, not realizing that they had the choice the entire time. ME2 was especially bad at this for 1 reasons: the optimal results of some encounters were only possible by playing to the extremes of the morality scale, disincentiving playing a more neutral character, severely hampering the RP aspect of the game.

KotOR 2: A great game narrative that weaves a story of moral grayness in an otherwise stark black and white universe... too bad the game mechanics are telling you the exact opposite. No meaningful or even petty decision in the game is really free from blue/red morality meter, meaning that whatever you thought on the matter of whether something was right or not is meaningless... the game has made up your mind for you. That and the fact that some of the best stat bonuses and experiences in the game (like Ludo Kressh's tomb) can not be experienced without play to one extreme or another. KotOR one doesn't have this problem, as they are playing into a world with a previously established morality system and adding to it. KotOR 2 is asking you to think beyond this with its story, but it isn't willing to back it up with its mechanics. I remain convinced that the only reason it even had a morality system in the game was as a hold over from KotOR 1 and, in my opinion, it would have been a better game with themes that encompass all it's aspects.

I disagree with your assessment of KOTOR II. While it is true that he game wanted to be a bit more morally complex, I don't remember a single time when the game plastered morality points on to what should have been a morally gray situation. The game offereed a lot of thematic an emotional epth within the individual paths, and the grey and grey morality was projected on to the world around the exile rather than the exile herself. Due to this there are very few times when our roleplaying instincts with your character's alignment, while at the same time not sacrificing the complexity of the story Obsidian was trying to tell. It is however a big problem in the mass effect games since your persuade skills and causes players to metagame for paragon and renegade points rather than actually roleplay a character, since doing so punishes the player by giving them fewer paths to take. In the KOTOR games it affects the player a lot less, and the only time you'll really feel the difference is if you're almost entirely toward one alignment and try to use a foce power of the other allignment (and again in my experience this only really makes a difference if you're almost pure dark side or pure light side)

 

[JustOrdinary]

Yknow, bastion had a pretty great ethical choice at the end. It wasn't choosing between lesser evils either. I hate arbitrary mother Theresa vs hitler moral choices too, but they CAN be done well if there's some actual significance within the context of the game. GTA4 was probably the silliest offender I can't think of, though infamous comes a close second

 

[Anthony Corrigan]

overlord, the "ethical" decisions were destruction or slavery