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#Gaming

Edited by Recon Number 54: 2/20/2013 11:51:37 PM
6

morality in games

why is it so hard to be a villain? almost every RPG and the like on console makes it far easier to be good than bad and all the good gear goes to the heroes. and almost all linear though"sandbox" games make you the hero by default why are unimportant/non-quest related NPCs unable to die? (yes, i know it's a cheat console variable on PC) why do the good weapons and gear go to a hero character only? why are most choices (GTA4, SR3,etc.) non-important at all?

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  • Do you mean "villain" or "hero" based on the game's numeric value for it (Like Karma from Fallout)? The answer for that would be it doesn't make any sense to assign every action some black and white "good or evil" number. When developers try and do this, the result is an awkward and unwieldy morality system where the player often feels disassociated with their "goodness or evilness" because their cumulative scores ends up being so arbitrary. As an example, in Fallout 3 New Vegas someone decided for some reason that killing feral ghouls was a "good" action. This makes no sense, given that a player can encounter feral ghouls in a variety of situations. Is the developer trying to send the message that only "good" characters would defend themselves from a ghoul attack? Many other actions also have similarly arbitrary karma scores. As a result I've ended up with the maximum "good" karma rating on nearly all of my Fallout NV characters. Never mind that, but a black-and-white system like that just cheapens the depth of moral dilemmas in general. Think of the classic [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem]Trolley Problem[/url]. That problem wouldn't be at all as thought provoking as it is if there was simply a "good" and "bad" option. It's more fun if there isn't a morality system. Problems are problems in themselves, and not just the player trying to artificially maintain his "morality" by managing his points. When the player isn't simply told "Good choice, evil choice" the player gets to think a lot more about whether he really did the right thing. Notice how in Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic there's a point system, but it's not associated with simply "good and evil". The ideas of "Jedi vs Sith" and "Paragon vs Renegade" are more complex than "good and bad". Those are more so measures of "chaos" and "order", with further implications within each game. While not perfect, those are pretty good ways of implementing some measure of the player's behavior without blatantly slapping a "GOOD GUY/BAD GUY" label on things. [b]tl;dr[/b] Point (number) based moral systems are a cheap way to shoe-horn in the concept of morality in games. It doesn't make any sense associating every single action with a simple "+1 Good" or "+1 Evil" score. This unnatural way of looking at morality results in a system where the player's "morality" rarely reflects how they actually play the game except in a very general sense (at best). [b]still tl;dr[/b] Point based morality systems are stupid. [b]Stiill still tl;dr[/b] [url=http://www.starfall.com/]Relevant[/url]

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