GCP – Episode 96 - 07/20
Interview with Frictional Games - 07/14
GCP – Episode 95 - 07/13
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Abolish the Good & Evil MeterPosted February 5, 2010, Comments (13) |
If passing atrocious gas is considered evil, then you can
call Shepard “El Diablo Grande.”
Paragon or Renegade, Jedi or Sith, Angel or Demon… are great PC titles truly so morally polarizing? The ongoing trend seems to suggest so. For a while, I never questioned this dynamic. Seemed natural. You blast kindly old ladies in the abdomens with quadruple-barreled napalm-missile guns, you get a slight nudge in the ol’ evil dial. Makes sense. At first, at least.
But shouldn’t a given action speak for itself? Why do we need a right & wrong thermostat in our inventory to affirm our in-game activities and dispositions? Good and evil meters are an artificially imposed visual teddy bear – something to comfortably latch onto to verify a set of imposed assumptions. Utilizing such a rigidly judgmental barometer is fatally formulaic. As the protagonist (or possibly, antagonist), I want to do what I think is right or wrong, not what the developer thinks is right or wrong. There’s no need for a concrete confirmation of either option. And know what? Gamers are smarter than that, and we could prove it, if only allowed a benefit of the doubt.
Rescue the chick in the tower, or let her burn. Insult the bartender’s heritage, or give him a verbal pat on the back. Nuke-a-blast a peaceful town, or arrest the man in black – all with on-screen discernible tallies of “You barkin’ up the bad guy tree par’ner!” or, ” You playin’ an encore of some good guy jazz, son!” Is everlasting redundancy in ethical execution really the best a game can do? Far too often, we choose a path (The Dark Side of the Force, for example) and our choices become a narrative and pictorial version of iambic pentameter: droning and numbing all along the way. And for the most part, we’re comfortable with this (and occasionally praising).
Until a thunderclap wakes us from our catatonic slumbers. The explosion of awareness jolted me earlier today, while I re-watched the Battlestar Galactica mini-series. Lee Adama warns the President that a Cylon attack is imminent on the remaining fleet. Problem is, only two thirds of the ships can escape to safety via an FTL jump (which is really just BSG-speak for: “Get the crap out of there really really quickly.”). The other spacecraft don’t have the engineering guts required for the jump process, and there’s no time to ferry the passengers to the ships that do. President Roslin has to make a hasty decision. She elects to leave the others behind to save the rest. She chooses safety over risk.
So, for sake of argument, let’s say that this exact same situation presents itself to us in Mass Effect 7: Shepard’s Bad Back. Precisely where would Roslin’s course of action fall under the inflexible Paragon / Renegade scale? Is leaving behind a third of the fleet in fear of complete annihilation an evil act? Or is noble? Is it *gasp* something in-between? As a viewer to Battlestar Galactica, it’s up to you to decide. And that’s the way it should be. It’s time PC games took a hint.
See, the best villains and heroes are the ones that identify themselves with the audience, or in the vehicle of PC gaming, the operators. And what’s a tangible and identifiable human feature? It’s blurring the lines between a typical societal assumption of right and wrong; it’s permitting the individual beholder to exercise their own conclusions based off their own perceptions. It’s freeing the players’ minds to conclude for themselves that which is ethically objectionable or behaviorally appropriate.
Indeed, the most rewarding moral choices are the ones that border on inconclusive. And here and there, we’ve seen some notable attempted deviations from the binary blueprint. Divinity II contained a sprinkling of hope early on, but utilized the bad choice / good choice selections far too frequently thereafter to really shine.
Hey devs? We’re grownups now. We’re big boys and girls. We don’t need training wheels for selective conduct causality. Let us judge for ourselves which courses of action merit which moral labels. Keep making your awesome games, yes; but let’s allow the deeds to unfold without the plastic good and evil gauges, ‘kay? Movies don’t have them, books don’t have them, and neither should games. Here’s to hoping this becomes an axiom.
But yeah, all that being said, if you consider dancing on defenseless monkeys’ faces with soccer cleats as a moral gray area, please seek professional help.
The only game I’ve ever played that truly offered ambiguous moral choices was The Witcher. In most RPGs, I decide at the beginning if I’m going to play a good character or a bad. I then spend the rest of the game making choices that match my initial decision. In The Witcher, I found myself staring at every decision trying to decide what to do. Not a single one of them was obviously good or bad and all of them had obvious repercussions later in the game. Despite what was said by Drew and Keenan on the podcast, even Dragon Age doesn’t have this; most choices are inherently good or evil; just wait and see whether your good companions agree with you or your evil companions do (some of them are more ambiguous, but for the most part they aren’t).
I LOVED the shades of grey choices that The Witcher presented me with, and I would literally throw money at the next developer to do something similar.
I haven’t stretched Mass Effect’s morality system very much. It seems to me that the Paragon/Renegade meters aren’t so much on a single spectrum of “good/evil,” though.
The meters appear to be purely additive. I’ve never lost Paragon points for doing a Renegade thing, so my actions aren’t swinging me back and forth like a pendulum. It’s more a measure of what kinds of outcomes I’m willing to accept. I can do Paragonish *and* Renegadish things. My results from the past are preserved, even if I change my attitude later.
Your points are well taken. The apparent moral dichotomy is overly polarized. And it’s strange that, in ME1 at least, the most significant choices on a personal level have practically no effect on the Paragon/Renegade chart.
I’m thinking of the choice of who to leave behind with the nuke. That’s almost exactly the situation the Roslyn faced in BSG. It’s telling that the developers failed — or refused — to integrate it into a mechanic when so many other life-and-death choices had measurable game effects.
Perhaps that’s how the narrative power of the game should play out: character building is more than accruing stats. When the game insists on tying morality to character skills development, the experience takes on a more munchkinny feel. Moral choices become tools to min/max performance, and frankly, that takes all the power away.
This exact idea has been bandied about on grognard sites like the Codex for some years, so you aren’t alone in your beef.
In recent years fault for this lies almost completely at Bioware’s door, as no one else really focuses on “karma meters” currently, and Bioware has followed the same Good/Bad/Rogue pattern for responses for almost a decade now.
Honestly the first game with a really interesting morality system was Ultima IV, and I’d like to see it make some kind of comeback simply because of the way it modeled behavior as 8 interlocked principles.
“For verily it is known that the three principles are Truth, Love and Courage; And that from Truth arises Honesty; And from Love arises Compassion; And from Courage arises Valour; And that Truth comingled with Love gives rise to Justice; And Love comingled with Courage gives rise to Sacrifice; And Courage comingled with Truth gives rise to Honor; And Truth, Love and Courage all united create Spirituality; And the absence of all three principles leads to the vice of pride, which leads us to think of the virtue that is its opposite, that of Humility.”
So yeah, even that would be way better than a simple Good/Bad dichotomy, even though it still might not account for the oft-desired “gray area morality”
I think the only effective way to model results of “gray” player behavior in a game is simply to have per-NPC or per-area “reputation”. If *everything* is reputation-based, the game is freed from having to pass judgment on you itself, and the results of everything you do can be interpreted by how they will cause NPCs to view you, which will contribute much more to player immersion.
So instead of “doing this will make your morality fuel meter rise/drop” we’d have “doing this will piss off these guys, make those guys happier, and make these other guys afraid of me/mock me/despise me/respect me” or whatever.
I’ve come to hate the entire good/evil system. There are a lot of times where I shoot someone I think deserves to die and get evil points for it?. Really? I got evil points for shooting a drug dealer? Why? Because the developers decided all good people don’t shoot first. Han Solo would beg to differ.
I’ve yet to encounter too many choices that weren’t simply good vs. evil choices in modern games. Dragon Age has had one (still playing it), Mass Effect had a couple and The Witcher has had one amazing example (I’m still fairly early there).
One of the most compelling games to me that involves choices is Splinter Cell: Double Agent. Because there the scale is your allegiance to the NSA and the terrorist origination you’ve infiltrated. Therefore, none of the horrible things you can do in the game, such as shoot an innocent cameraman or blow up a cruise ship are reinforced as being evil choices, but simply ways to maintain your cover. That’s a compelling way to present it where it might be necessary for you to do evil in order to further the greater good. More games need that kind of morality that reflects upon the situation of the character you are playing and less on this binary choice between two extremes.
These are all great comments. And I’m glad to hear I’m by far not alone in the want for a moral gray area. As Cameron points out, I do enjoy the parallel Paragon/Renegade aspect of Mass Effect, but if they go that route (and I do applaud them for doing so), what purpose do the meters serve at all? So close yet so far, Bioware.
“There are a lot of times where I shoot someone I think deserves to die and get evil points for it?. Really? I got evil points for shooting a drug dealer? Why?”
Yeah, that shit drives me bonkers as well. Let ME decide goddammit. Don’t impose YOUR moreys into MY play style.
“Honestly the first game with a really interesting morality system was Ultima IV, and I’d like to see it make some kind of comeback simply because of the way it modeled behavior as 8 interlocked principles.”
That’s pretty intense. I like it. Not perfect, but damn better than what we have these days. And the same guy that came up with that is now a space-jockey? What the hell??
“I LOVED the shades of gray choices that The Witcher presented me with, and I would literally throw money at the next developer to do something similar.”
I really want to play this game (now, ever more so). I have it on Steam, but haven’t had the chance to fire her up yet. Hopefully soon.
Play The Witcher. It’s repercussions for a seemingly simple choice are amazing.
The reputation / relations seems like the best way to get things done if you want to implement moral quandaries. Rather than an absolute gauge, make it relative to certain entities in a universe.
That’s one thing I liked about AOC, you could be any class and not be good nor evil. Although if you were a demonologist or necromancer you were probably stereotyped as evil because of our society’s views.
Personally, I hated the choices in The Witcher. First, there wasn’t enough information to make an intelligent choice (which made the decision completely arbitrary), and second, all choices led to the same – or very similar – bad results (which made my decisions meaningless). This was supposed to make the game “gritty” I know, but in reality, it just made my choices completely arbitrary and virtually meaningless.
I have nothing against “good” vs “evil” choices. We rarely have a difficulty in RL separating out such things, do we? Murdering a drug dealer is still murder and still a crime (“killing” is not always “murdering,” though – it depends on the circumstances). Of course, a gameworld’s culture is likely to be different from our own (a medieval society where starvation is a real possibility is likely to execute criminals, not imprison them), but right and wrong are still understood. Sometimes, it might be difficult to decide what’s right, but not usually.
All too often, the call for ambiguous moral choices is just a matter of power-gamers wanting to do whatever will make their characters richest and strongest. What I’d much prefer are DIFFICULT choices – decisions where you have a reasonable understanding of the situation, where you can actually try to make the best decision possible (ideally, including compromise or some third choice), but where there’s still going to be pain. For example, you can’t be in two places at one time, so if two villages need help, you’ll probably have to choose between them. That’s NOT morally ambiguous, but you’ll still have to live with the consequences of your decision.
And there MUST be consequences. Power-gamers often play an amoral character, because that’s what gives them the most wealth and experience. In RL, there are severe negative consequences for such behavior (which is why most of us reserve such actions for our gameplaying), but most of the time, there aren’t really any significant consequences in games. Pick-pocketing is generally a very popular skill in RPGs, making characters wealthy and powerful. But that’s certainly not the case in RL, is it? In RL, pick-pockets are pathetic losers who, if nothing else, are simply too dumb to consider the risk-reward ratio.
Ideally, playing an evil or amoral character in a computer game should make things MUCH more difficult. This should not be the natural choice of power-gamers, but just the reverse, appealing only to players who want a real challenge.
I can do without an artificial “good & evil meter,” but not without consequences for my characters’ actions. And heck, even the “right” decisions can have negative, as well as positive, consequences. But most of the time (not always), what’s “right” and what’s “wrong” aren’t all that difficult to determine.
The problem lies with the inherent nature of video games that make morality an issue; it is no simple task to attribute a system of morality by using mathematics. Games are built off that, and trying to incorporate something that which itself cannot be “solved” by means of math makes it incredibly difficult. One simply can’t create morality as we human beings know it in a video game. The best one can do is take the core concepts (x is bad, y is good) and put numbers to it. As of this time, video games are too young in its existence to properly do such a concept right, and I honestly don’t see it happening any time soon. Maybe some things are best left to not being emulated.
Also computers can’t handle uncertainty very well.
This is an excellent point. The nature of how games are actually made is built in such a way that it’s hard to have a meaningful moral system in place.
I think the problem is that games let you chose and they have to account for all those choices and it has to be a finite number of possible choices which almost inherently in itself means that the consequences for those actions are the developers imposing their own moral system on the player.
Other mediums can skirt around this by having the morality be through the eyes of a character. We may not agree with the morals of a character, but it’s not us making the choices so we are distanced from it. When we make the choices and are punished for what we see as a good choice, it generates the kinds of issues I think a lot of us are bring up.
I feel like Mass Effect has taken a decent approach to this. The choices are less obvious, at least the subtle side-quest ones. You select a dialog option that is represented by a few words and hten your character delivers it. I was surprised many times by how my character delivered the response I selected. For me, it’s something that made the game story great. Sure it does tell you what effect your decision had after the fact, but it is not exactly the good/evil that some games bring. Paragon or Renegade, is one really evil? Don’t you want to be a little bit renegade even if you are the good guy? Sometimes you just need to intimidate.
In Star Wars, the light and dark sides are so ingrained in the world that I couldn’t imagine a Star Wars game without a good/evil meter.
Here’s the problem: there are currently about 6 billion unique moral compasses on the planet. Morality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
Assuming one is trying to model reality, moral effects in gaming should be expressed by the denizens of that world, not by some G&E Meter.