Morality in video games, how can we improve it?

[Singing Gremlin]

The fact is games do do this but when they do everyone whines. Anyone remember the ending of Fable II? Yeah, that wasn't so clear cut, but I've only heard people moan about it.

Far Cry 2? You get the choice to save the civilians in the church or your murderer mates at the boozer, and yet I've yet to see any praise on the moral choices there.

Let's be honest, we don't actually want moral choices, we just want something to moan about. Seriously, saving the kitten gives the buzz of morality not usually available to us in real life, while burning down the tree and then throwing it at a nearby old lady is frickin' hilarious. Those are the fun choices, not choosing whether to save the middle aged mother or her ill and likely to snuff it anyway baby.

 

[Kajt]

By making games that are more like Deus Ex.

The horror.


Reduce the effects of your choices. Or at least delay them.

 

[Gado911]

Make us have complete choice not just "if you kill the guy your evil, if you save the guy your good or if you don't do anything you neutrul" They should have more options within.

 

[quack35]

By making games that are more like Deus Ex.

 

[Dr.Sean]

Killable babies.

Consumable babies.

 

[Advent Antigone]

Stop making people choose between eating fifty kittens for breakfast or nursing an army of five years olds back to life.

They should start by using a five step moral chart rather than a two So it's not good or evil, but Evil, Less Evil, Nuetral, Mildly Saintly, And Saintly.

Sounds like a plan.

Evil: Kick the kitten
Less Evil: Steal the kitten's chew toy
Neutral: Do nothing to the kitten
Mildly Saintly: Give the kitten a treat
Saintly: Give the kitten a cheeseburger

Is that pretty much the system?

Yes, exactly. Stop making you choose between being Mother Teresa or the Anti Christ. And for once, I'd love to see a game give you an actual 'I don't give a shit' option. Not 'Save The Villagers From Bandit Attack' or 'Help The Bandits'. How about walk away from the village and return at a later time.

See, the problem with these sort of things is that gamers mix up the difference between a problem and a choice. Take Fable, for instance(This is based off of my experience in the first one). Okay, you can be evil and kill everyone, but why bother? People run from you upon spotting, and most shop keepers won't even sell you items. If you're good, however, people love you and want to marry you and shit. Obviously, the better choice is to be good. Making it a problem. It's no longer a choice if one option is ridiculously better than the other. Take Infamous. It's obviously going to be more fun to kill deranged hobos than help them. Problem, not choice. Until game designers pull their bloody heads out of their asses and realize this, moral choices in gaming won't improve.

 

[Shoqiyqa]

They should start by using a five step moral chart rather than a two So it's not good or evil, but Evil, Less Evil, Nuetral, Mildly Saintly, And Saintly.

I'd say more complicated.

There's an article up about religion. How come so many religions agree on so much and disagree on so much? Well, how about throwing that in a gamer's face? You can be a good Anima-worshipping vegetarian pacifist, a good honourable warrior true to your word, a holy warrior smiting evil, a devious son of a gun or a devastatingly effective single-minded mission-finisher. Choose one.

There might be a lot to be gained by abandoning the "good points / evil points" thing. Instead of having to accumulate one or the other by consistently eating one pill or the other, have differing rewards for different choices in different places. Have things you can only "unlock" by being human rather than extreme one way or another.

 

[Time Travelling Toaster]

Don't allow people to choose good or evil. Well not first hand anyways. Give the player a chance to save a child in the beginning of the game just to fast forward a couple decades to find out he is the next Hitler. Make all decisions vague when dealing with the outcome, just like real life.

Actually this is quite a good idea, if you could somehow predict what you're choices may cause in the later game, as your example save a child who turns out to be evil, but then their is another that could beat him but you killed him and condemened people to a fate of death etc. rather than just badass or saint.

 

[Littaly]

Hello? Yahtzee, is that you?

Anyway, sooner or later they'll start putting some more effort into it. I really doubt Infamous was made for the people who like to make moral choices.

 

[Ace of Spades]

inFamous would have done better if the system were like in Mass Effect, where you have two independent meters. That way, you could mix and match powers from both sides. Not perfect, but I would have liked it better that way. Rant aside, it was still a fun game.

 

[GeoPB]

Have lots and lots of shades of grey! I mean like a bus load of it. Like Fable II's Cruel/Pure system, but a lot bigger.

 

[Advent Antigone]

They should start by using a five step moral chart rather than a two So it's not good or evil, but Evil, Less Evil, Nuetral, Mildly Saintly, And Saintly.

I'd say more complicated.

There's an article up about religion. How come so many religions agree on so much and disagree on so much? Well, how about throwing that in a gamer's face? You can be a good Anima-worshipping vegetarian pacifist, a good honourable warrior true to your word, a holy warrior smiting evil, a devious son of a gun or a devastatingly effective single-minded mission-finisher. Choose one.

There might be a lot to be gained by abandoning the "good points / evil points" thing. Instead of having to accumulate one or the other by consistently eating one pill or the other, have differing rewards for different choices in different places. Have things you can only "unlock" by being human rather than extreme one way or another.

Not all games touch on religion, though, so pulling that into it can be irrelavent.

 

[S.H.A.R.P.]

Moral choices that aren't included in bloody dialogue choices.

That's a big one. no one ever says things that're obviously good or obviously evil in regular conversation, so stop making us do that.

That's why I liked KoTOR. If I chose a certain path for my character, good or evil basically, I often had to think about say five answers provided which was actually the (most) evil one. That is partly to blame because I didn't always pay attention to previous conversation, but also because not every choice was directly obvious for being evil or good.

The problem is if you want to avoid these 50/50 choices, you have to include an insane amount of possible dialogue, which is pretty hard to do I'd guess. But I don't think (how nice it may sound) that you can exclude morality from conversation. If you can't make choices in conversation, than why have it at all?

 

[not a zaar]

Believe it or not, Postal 2 has one of the best 'morality system' of any game, by which I mean there is no 'morality system', because morality is not a simple concept that can diluted to a binary choice or simulate with a number scale. The game gives you a list of humdrum everyday objective: go to the bank, do some shopping, etc... How you accomplish those objectives, if you do so at all, is completely up to the player. Now THAT is what I call player choice.

 

[dmase]

Well for starters make children killable in Fallout 3, princess deserves.
How the heck does anyone decide whether this is good or evil like if you randomly kill the drug dealer with no quest attachment is it good or bad, it get the cops after you but you got him off the streets. They need to design a god system that can be put into a game with no prerendered thoughts but thoughts that randomly are decided at the beginning of a new game whether something is good or bad and can change throughout.

 

[dmase]

Believe it or not, Postal 2 has one of the best 'morality system' of any game, by which I mean there is no 'morality system', because morality is not a simple concept that can diluted to a binary choice or simulate with a number scale. The game gives you a list of humdrum everyday objective: go to the bank, do some shopping, etc... How you accomplish those objectives, if you do so at all, is completely up to the player. Now THAT is what I call player choice.

Everybody consideres EA and all their designs to be the ultimate evil but they unlocked the key to one of the biggest questions in gaming almost 10 years ago, they are gods and we are ants submit to EAs greatness. The sims.

 

[Iwamori]

Like the light and dark world systems of games, Good/Evil is overdone and needs to go. The game should have a good story written so that it makes sense, but allow the player choices to adjust the story and actually impact the game world. Fallout3 for example, regardless of whether you're good or evil you always go to fundamentally the same destination, turn on Project purity, etc. What if I wanted to just blow up project purity with my fatman, join Paradise falls and enslave the entire wasteland? There's only an appearance of freedom, not really that much actually there.

 

[knightguy123]

Don't allow people to choose good or evil. Well not first hand anyways. Give the player a chance to save a child in the beginning of the game just to fast forward a couple decades to find out he is the next Hitler. Make all decisions vague when dealing with the outcome, just like real life.

it seems you have indigo prophechy syndrome

 

[knightguy123]

Killable babies.

Consumable babies.

killible,consumable,super babies