what's really interesting is that when I first played KOTOR, I actually played Neutral (Force alignment smack in the middle the whole time) which led to a pretty freaking awesome mix of Sith and Jedi powers, until the very end when I went good. My first playthrough of Mass Effect on the other hand I was simply me. 60% Paragon and 40% Renegade. So I'd say in general, a mix of grey but mostly good.
I'm usually good, especially in BioWare games where the NPCs make you feel like a complete ass if you pick the evil choices. But in games like Infamous which want you to play evil, I'll play evil.
I like to think of myself as good, mostly because when I see some poor woman crying because her daughter died, I move to comfort her without a second thought, however I'll also headbutt a Krogan or shoot a looter without a second thought, so I don't know, maybe I'm bipolar.
Always, always dickheadedly evil. Being able to Force Storm innocent people for trying to ask me to save their parents/children/spouse etc. is too much fun.
For instance, I'm an avid D&D player and me and my cohorts have come to the conclusion that when given the choice to be as evil as we want, we either piss off each other too much or just don't do anything that evil. So I find myself gravitating towards that good guy who wants to help the poor, protect the innocent, and take out the tyrant. Though I have played the morally gray character who would just as soon kill you as crack a joke with you if you got in the way of what he wanted.
When it comes to video games I've found exactly what you've pointed out, every choice is black or white. Either you save the kittens or light them up in front of the orphans. Very rarely are you given the option of morally gray being a choice. Even Bioshock played the old trope of really simplistic view on good and evil with the little sister question. Unless you were a heartless bastard, you knew that harvesting the little sisters was an awful thing to do despite the short term pay off.
Though the king of terrible morality is any of the Fable games. It's just so ridiculous how simplistic they made good and evil that you really find yourself just not caring.
There is some shades of gray, according to some, when it comes go what is "good" and "evil." Such as, do you kill the bad guy, or do you have mercy and spare his life, and leave it up to the justice system.
Then again it is fun to be naughty, such as the case in Fallout 3. I have to say, the dialogue is underrated in this game, and it's very fun to select the rude dialogue options and see the NPC's reaction. Those writers at Bethesda have quite the imagination.
I can't usually bring myself to be evil in video games. What if the computer-generated people don't like me? Although I did end up picking quite a few renegade conversation choices in ME2, simply because they were more hilarious than feeling like I was curb-stomping a kitten. This system of being good was forever cemented into my mind as I received the "bad ending" in Bioshock 2 last night, and was treated with the most depressing sections of video gaming that I have EVER been a part of. All those little girls...
I "try" to pick the kind of choices I think I would make in those situations (which usually leads to me helping people almost unanimously, but stealing anything that would help me survive X)
Like everyone else, I hate the black and white options, because I would much rather ba "kinda good with the occasional iffy choice", but it goes further than that. I think "Good/Evil" in general is a little archaic. Is a charcter in Fallout who helps everyone but steals things good? How about someone who saves the world but executes a few people to do it, is he evil? The real world far deeper than that. The only game that has come close to handling issues where both options really feel "right" is Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 in my opinion and even then there are issues such as the following:
In Mass Effect 1 choosing the order of the planets you visit when you first get the Normandy is a great choice. In the trailer it looks as if making one choice, executes the people on the other planets. Not so. In fact there's no change.
MUCH MORE ANNOYINGLY
In Mass Effect 2, my favourite choice was at the end of Legion's sub-mission. To me, both options were extremely valid. I wavered for a long time over which to pick, as did other people I discussed it with. However, choosing option B leads to a ridiculous amount of Renegade points. The one choice I felt truly questionable about and the designers had already decided what was evil and what was good.
If games ever want to move into dealing with more serious themes, they're going to have to deal with the fact that serious themes rarely have "good" answers. Heavy Rain looks like the first game to deal with this in a way I like. It's not a true good/bad system, but the choices you make, impact the way the story continues. I like it this way.
... Sorry for the longest post.
--EDIT : Just to make it a bit longer, the fact that most games reward you for going total good, or total evil, removes all ambiguous choices because you just make whatever choice you think the game designers want you to. This is another thing I dislike.
I think my handle tells you that I'm somewhere between the two. I love to play mainly good (90% or so) and usually have a messup or two somewhere that lets me remember not to mess up later on without having a prior save ready.
I lean towards the Saintly Badass if I can, but I do tend to do that on playthrough number one. In Fable I played as the paragon of justice, then I made a new playthrough where I was the remorseless prick. I feel that being good tends to be the challenging one since being evil gave you so many benefits. I was the Little Sister Savior in the first Bioshock since it was a handicap in most events; evil gave you the advantage of more Adam than you could possibly use while the good character suffered from scrounging and carefully choosing between what plasmids/tonics to buy.
I'm usually uneasy just killing droves of people that don't deserve it, most of those townsfolk were annoying, but not really enough for me to be shiving them in the ribs every time they wanted me to do something.
That is to say, I won't go out of my way to be a jerk to someone (or kill them), but I won't go out of my way to kiss or save someone's ass either. I do what I think is best for me. To give an example, in Mass Effect 2 when I finished my first playthrough I was 75% Renegade and 50% Paragon.
Both, because there's no option closest to having a good facade while being secretly dark and deadly behind the scenes, not revealing your true nature till it's too late for your victims.
But yeah generally it just depends on what's more useful to me at the time. Like in ME2, I played both paragon and renegadde, yet still shock the living fuck out of that batarian. Not just because it lets me kill the gunship with 3 grenades, but also because it's funny as hell.
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