Morality in games.

I liked the way Devil Survivor handled it. No such thing as an Obviously Evil choice, as any choice will be made with good intentions (including becoming a demon overlord).

Because honestly, there is no such thing as an actual evil person*

. Everyone just wants to live their life, and have all sorts of justifications for their actions.

Unfortunately, most RPG's seem to forget about the word 'intentions'.

Probably the worst example of a karma system I've ever seen is in the original Fable. You're all but forced into taking the good path except for a few optional choices that dont affect much, since every quest in the main plot gives you good karma. If you decide you would rather be evil, the only way to do it it to massacre random villagers over and over again, or to pay people money so you can sacrifice them to the devil. Stupid Evil of the worst kind.

It bugs me how often the good alignment is the path the developers expect you to take. Games are escapist fantasy and a persons real world morals dont have to apply, so why do developers often assume that if given a choice between liberating a world or ruling it with an iron fist, that everyone will automatically want to do the former? It feels like the developers are judging you for your actions in the game world (actions which, because games arent real and NPC's are just clouds of 0's and1's with no thought or emotions, have no consequences and no bearing on the player's actual morality). Of course, there are games where the choice isn't forced and alignment is entirely in your hands, such as Infamous and KOTOR. Hell, Infamous arguably gives you a better ending for taking the evil path. But too many games force the decision on you, the worst of them making the evil path seem like a Nonstandard Game Over. Worse are the games where the player takes an action that to them is wholly justified (like killing somebody for their crimes instead of turning them in), and then penalising them for their choice. Why do you even have the option if they're just going to railroad you into choosing the alignment they want?

The point is, morality differs from person to person anyway, and games have no absolute morality anyway because they arent real and dont affect the player's actual morality. Calling a player evil because they might prefer playing evil characters makes you a judgemental asshole. So why do developers do it so often?

Can't think of anything witty, so have this instead...

Because they expect you to at least have some willing suspension of disbelief and take the story seriously.

Willing Suspension of Disbelief has nothing to do with it. I often do take the story seriously and choose evil alignments, simply because I like to play characters with no restrictions. A person should not be judged for their actions in fictional worlds.

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Still, you are basing your in-game moral choices on the fact that it is merely fiction, instead of acting as you really would in that situation. And the latter is often what the game expects.

This is more a limitation of the dialogue system of Mass Effect rather than the Karma Meter. Its Karma Meter is flawed in that despite repeatedly stating that Paragon and Renegade are both legal choices and equally treated, in general, Paragon is always treated as the "correct" decision, because clearly doing good deeds to everyone is better than giving out the occasional boot upside the head for educational purposes. Through all of two games it backfires only TWICE - the Feros mission is more difficult if you want to be a Paragon in the first, and the Eclipse mercenary you let live in the second (which may or may not backfire after all in the third) which you learn only after the fact.

Case in point - most of the "good" options in Dragon Age 2, blessed it be for not actually having a MORALITY meter, are concerned with twisting Merrill off her planned path. Most of the characters that try to do this in-story do it like boneheaded dicks and if you have a shred of common sense you will NOT empathize with Marethari who effectively kills herself to show Merrill how wrong she is. As an unplanned Thanatos Gambit to make her suffer for staying true to her beliefs instead of trying to convince her WHY they might be considered wrong. If you take it seriously, you will not go down the "good" path, but rather the "kind" one. AND THAT SEPARATION IS AWESOME.

Also, the aforementioned Alpha Protocol was very good about how it handled goodness and evilness of what you do and how it is perceived by the characters. That, in fact, you could be a right bastard but carefully endear choice characters to think you're cool =)

Videogames do not make you a worse person... Than you already are.

^^ Not everyone does that though. I'm not some meathead that plays games for their catharsis factor alone, but I do like to cut loose all my real world restraint and enjoy myself. And I do find it enjoyable to play properly evil bastards with no compunction for killing everyone who crosses them. Cutting loose like that in a fictional world is fun. Doesn't mean I'd do it in real life (of course, I'm not a level 99 sorceror who can shoot lightning from his eyes in real life).

The point I'm trying to get across is that, if a game proclaims that it has the option to choose whether to play good or evil, then it should be a choice, not a foregone conclusion railroaded by the dev team.

^ Agreed, Alpha Protocol did it exceptionally well.

edited 9th Nov '11 11:21:23 AM by OmegaKross

Can't think of anything witty, so have this instead...

Fair enough, though I have no problems with evil actions being punished as long as it's plausible. Which I loved about the Fallout games, by the way: there was no instant bolt of divine retribution for your evil actions, but you'd have a conspicuous amount of high-level bounty hunters going after your head.

Amen to that. As I've mentioned before, I'm working my way through composing a dev-doc on a Mass Effect-like game that could try to account for that capability while:

• managing to stay implementable in the realm of humanly possible programming
• not becoming a number-crunchy-complicated game only the Japanese fandom of Wizardry could tolerate and/or enjoy
• staying theoretically fun

I still can't program for crap, sadly, but it IS a fun hobby, if a little cheap on the "stuff you have to show for it" outcome.

I thought it also happens as retribution for being to GOOD a do-gooder. I mean, when you piss off evildoers, they're supposed to be more prompt about sendind people to inhume you.

edited 9th Nov '11 11:35:55 AM by Noelemahc

Videogames do not make you a worse person... Than you already are.

Yeah, I'm not saying there should be no in-game consequences. It's expected that you'd have local law enforcement trying to kill you. Though the psychic guards in Oblivion took it a bit far.

"STOP! YOU'VE VIOLATED THE LAW!"

"But all I did was accidentally click on this spoon and pick it up!"

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Fun, interesting, too extreme. I usually play as good solely for the story, I can only be rushed by and murder an innocent crowd so many times.

Likes many underrated webcomics

I enjoy having choices and moral dilemmas in video games, so I'm all for morality systems. And since I'm an RPG lover, those are mostly the games I play. But what is needed, I think, is exclusion of the linear morality meter - good vs. evil. It would be good to have hard choices that make you ponder what is the most right thing to do in a complex situation, rather than simple ones. That makes the game more engaging. A morality meter for the character is not always necessary or even needed, in my opinion, but it can be interesting in its own right if it's done well. I remember a guy suggesting a morality wheel, which is a fairly better substitute for the linear one.

I find this video has more on the matter and I quite agree with some of the ideas that are presented:

edited 9th Nov '11 11:57:00 AM by whataboutme

Please don't feed the trolls!

I dunno—when I realized that every path I could take in the later Geneforge games would require me to kill named characters I'd started to like, I also realized that there was a way to avoid killing any of them.

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

^^ I've seen that video before and I agree it does bring up many good points and ways to improve the system... but again with the assumption that good is the default.

Though I never can kill the Little Sisters. Tried it once and felt like a monster.

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Ogre Battle March Of The Black Queen

You could be as good or evil(or neutral) as you wanted, but your reputation with the populace depended on how you liberated cities.

If a Tyrant has his knights in shining armor march in to save the day, everyone will love him because all they see are the knights, and what they see forms the basis of their opinion on your cause as a whole. Alternatively, being the Messiah doesn't mean anything if you roll with a pack of werewolves that scare everyone off.

The Fallout games that use reputation also count. Basically, you have your morality, then you have a rating for what each town/faction thinks of you.

Can you give me a specific example of this in SJ? Because I stopped maybe midway and don't remember anything that extreme.

It sucks that I can't think of more games with ethical choices other than The Witcher games, Tactics Ogre, some Shin Megami Tensei games, and Deus Ex.

But it's hard to say when moral choices will stop being dominant, since they're the most familiar and popular to mainstream gaming.

edited 9th Nov '11 2:30:29 PM by JotunofBoredom

Umbran Climax◊

To mention, I can think of a damn good reason to keep track of personal morality, vis a vis intent, in addition to or instead of actions and consequences and reputation. What you do effects the world around you. However, *why* you do it effects *you*. . . and potentially has consequences on what kind of a person you are/become.

Fallout New Vegas handled this in an interesting, if flawed, manner: throughout most of the game, the karma meter seems largely irrelevant. Sure, you could be good, bad, or in between, but reputation is what actually effects how NP Cs react to you, what quests you can do, etc. And then you beat the game, and find out that your alignment effects the *ending*, or rather, the epilogue slides. Your choices in game determine the course of the game, and many of the ending possibilities. . . but your alignment determines what your character does *after* the game is over. Which makes sense, an absolute monster is presumably going to do different things than a saint, or a guy just doing his best to survive.

( what made it flawed was how the game assigned karma points; it was far too easy to accumulate good karma, and too hard to get bad karma )

Home of CBR Rumbles-in-Exile: rumbles.fr.yuku.com

Generating evil karma in Fallout 3/New Vegas requires you to pretty much go around shooting everyone you see and steal all their stuff. You wind up failing several missions in 3 if you play evil (but the Tranquility Lane quest becomes way more fun). Basically, you need to play like a total sociopath. It can be fun, and you do get a lot of caps. Course, there's no point to caps if you've killed everybody and taken all their shit. Also, marching into Galaxy News and shooting Three Dog in the face gets you a humourous message about how "some asshole came in here and shot our DJ".

Can't think of anything witty, so have this instead...

I was a total kleptomaniac in New Vegas and my karma was still set to Very Good.

Umbran Climax◊

Yeah, you have to kill everybody too. Being a thieving bastard on it's own isn't enough to offset all the good karma you get from quests.

Can't think of anything witty, so have this instead...

Which kind of makes sense. If you're saving settlements from bandits and mutants the people are likely to blame any loss of goods and caps on the (late) bad guys rather than their savior, whereas if you start shooting people then you're the bad guy they see.

But we're talking about personal Karma, not reputation, which is considered separately.

Whether or not theivery reduces reputation depends on you being caught(I've never been caught stealing 'cept by the Powder Gangers, but screw them anyway), but you always get bad karma for it. Of course, since theft is petty, it doesn't really give you that much bad karma relative to, say, sabotaging the Bright Brotherhood's rocket.

So you want a game where there you never any decisions with losses?

edited 9th Nov '11 4:08:24 PM by JotunofBoredom

Umbran Climax◊

Actually, that kind of annoyed me. Yes, stealing stuff only gave fairly trivial bad karma. . . but that's more bad karma than you'd get for killing maybe half or more of the NP Cs in the game! Karma for kills should have been calculated based on your reputation with a faction, and whether they are hostile or not. There also should have been more quest-based awards of negative karma ( and the ones that did exist made bigger ).

Home of CBR Rumbles-in-Exile: rumbles.fr.yuku.com

I wonder whether it's actually appropriate for games to reward or punish personal intent separate from the player's actual actions and what NP Cs perceive.

Are there any potential downsides for a pure action -> consequence system that doesn't touch hidden intent at all?

Well, in practice, its what we tend to have *now*. The main downside is poor "neutral" options.

Here's a thought for a morality system: three meters. "Compassion", "Self-Interest", "Destruction." Each is increased or decreased separately, often by the same action. "Compassion" goes up when you help somebody else, goes down when you don't help someone in need. "Self-Interest" goes up when you take actions that reward your character ( in resources or advancement of main goals ), go down when you take actions that cost you. "Destruction" goes up when you break things, kill people, and cause chaos and havok, goes down when you solve problems in other ways.

Now, a single action may alter all three meters. Lets say someone offers a bounty to rescue a hostage from some bandits. If you take the bounty, go out, kill the bandits, and rescue the hostage, you'd gain points in all three meters: Compassion for the rescue, Self-Interest for the bounty, and Destruction for the dead bandits. If you instead did the rescue by intimidating the bandits into letting the hostage go, you'd gain Compassion and Self-Interest but not Destruction. If you *bribed* the bandits to let her go, you'd still gain Compassion, but you'd *lose* Destruction ( paying people to do stuff being sufficiently opposite from violence to be worth losing points, unlike intimidation ), and your Self-Interest would stay the same.

Your ratings on all three meters would thus determine how the world views you, but not in a simple binary manner. A high Destruction rating, for instance, wouldn't mean your evil; it could just mean you do good deeds through violence. The stereotypical wandering hero would probably have high ratings in all three: do good deeds, kill evil people, collect rewards. Extremely *low* ratings in all three wouldn't make you a hero, either: your probably a manipulative type who doesn't care about money and doesn't like fighting.

Home of CBR Rumbles-in-Exile: rumbles.fr.yuku.com

The best karma meter is either one that is nonexistent (whether it just affects approval ratings or you have choices without the need for a morality stat) or one that is nonintrusive (like Fallout 1,2 and NV or Planescape Torment where it doesn't have too many overall affects and is more of a little roleplay/character development feature instead).

I don't think Choices and consequences should need to be graded on a morality scale- if it has to be done factional alignments or relationship approval meters are the better approach.

That's basically my stance on it.