Moral Choices: Are they good or bad?

Choice surrounds every aspect of daily life, the ability to choose is central to concepts of freedom.  Increasingly games are offering players choices as a means of bringing openness to their worlds, as a means of allowing players to feel they are having an impact.  But are they valid options?  Do choices constitute an improvement to the medium of gaming, or are they a gimmick?

political controversy quota filled

Personally, morality for me is a foregone conclusion.  I simply can’t be evil in games.  Every time I see an evil option come up, I look at it, and just feel guilty.  I know they are only pixels, but still…  The only exception to that so far has been Fable.  In Fable, the choices were so ludicrous that I had to give it a go.  You could be evil in the way saturday morning cartoon villains are evil.  It was so silly, and made no sense at all.  If you played the game with the added chapters, it was hilarious.  I was fully evil, I had horns, glowing eyes, flaming foot prints, the works.  But then a new villain arises, the guild master asks for my assistance.  My character stands there looking thoughtful and nodding as flies buzz round her head and the guild master begs for your aid.  Clearly moral choices at that point are proved to be utterly shallow and inconsequential, I was the most evil being in the world, yet I was forced to save everyone in order to continue the story.  It fell flat at another point, where I accepted a quest from a farmer and his wife, something to do with a ghost I think.  As soon as I entered their farm yard, the wife threw her arms in the air and ran in small circles screaming.  Yet I could work up to her and initiate conversation.  We talked, I took the quest to help out.  The moment the conversation finished, she resumed her circles in the centre of the yard.  The whole scenario was so ridiculous you just had to laugh.

In situations like that, I find it annoying when something supposedly integral to the game is then taken out of your hands.  You can affect the small things, but the big things, not a chance.  Other games encounter similar problems.  *spoiler alert* at the end of Splinter Cell Conviction, you are offered the choice of shooting the agency head, or letting him go.  This is at the end of a game whereby you have slaughtered your way across the world, seeking revenge, torturing people for information.  Yet at the end, you can take the moral high ground?  The very idea is just stupid, and totally out of character.  We are expected to believe Sam FIsher can have a sudden twinge of remorse?  a touch of guilt?  It is totally jarring.  You cannot really put it down to a player choice either, when you have just reached the conclusion of a game based around killing.
Choices therefore have to be relevant.  The problem they bring to games, like the above example, is when they are thrown in, a token gesture, a nod to something popular.  IF the game is going to incorporate choice, it needs to be central to the gameplay.  It may not drive the whole plot, but it needs to be an integral part.  Dragon Age Origins is a good example, tracking decisions on the basis of the effect it has on your team.  The plot stays the same, but it can still be powerful, and is something important players keep an eye on.
The problem games have had so far for me is that morality is not a black and white issue.  You cannot reduce complex situations to a yes or no answer.  Very few games have so far been able to express a realistic response in terms of choices offered.  The old PC RPG’s, Baldur’s Gate and co.  offered a range of outlooks for your character, not just good and bad, but lawful and chaotic too.  In those I always chose the ‘true neutral’ option.  That left me the freedom to act as I felt best.  It was a way of avoiding the stark black and white that either end of the scale offered, resulting in what I believe to be a more realistic choice.  Fallout 3 offered a perk that worked if your karma was neutral, yet to be neutral in that game would typically involve doing a mixture of good and evil quests/responses.  That is not being neutral.  Neutrality is not saving one village, and then burning the next.  It is this complexity that is so hard to capture in a system that still allows both the freedom to choose, and to have those choices actually matter.

the answer is never simple

SO, what we have are some games were choices are merely token gestures, empty and at odds with the game, and others where the choices are too over the top, stark black and white which can really spoil the immersion such choices ought to improve.  Where does it work then?  For me, one game has really stood out when it comes to decisions.  The Witcher.  It was not terribly well received, but I absolutely loved it start to finish, and found it incredibly engaging.  For anyone who hasn’t played it, what the Witcher did was present you with options where you could not anticipate the final outcome.  A man asks you to guard a pile of medicine.  A group of starving, destitute, persecuted elves arrive and tell you the stash is for them and they are here to collect it.  Do you give it to them or not?  You have to make a decision with no clear right or wrong.  A woman is being accused of witchcraft, hell hounds are attacking a village and she is blamed.  She has the ingredients necessary for such a spell, but she claims she is a healer.  You have to decide whether or not you defend her, or if you let the villagers burn her at the stake, having no clue if she is guilty or not.

how do you know she's a witch?

This kind of situation is what works best.  Gut instinct and educated guesses.  It really makes you wonder and fret over every decision, it isn’t just a kill/rescue kitten option.  Where the Witcher also excels is that every choice you make can have a profound effect on the game.  The whole plot can be changed, the way you need to do things.  Innocent seeming choices can lead to major complications later in the game.  Another game that worked exceptionally well in this was Army of Two:  The 40th Day.  There were plenty of choices in that where you could have no real knowledge of the consequences.  Whilst these choices did not have major effects on the game, they were inkeeping with the personalities of the protagonists, and could also be entertaining.  If you chose to release the tiger from the zoo, it went and ate a criminal.

Tigers, defenders of the peace

The final positive example I have, is that of Mass Effect 2.  The paragon and renegade system is excellent.  In that, you are always the hero, always saving the world, but it is up to you how scrupulous you are in doing so.  Do you always do the right thing, or does the end justify the means?  Not only were they intelligent options, they were highly cinematic.  I found myself using a pretty even mix of paragon and renegade events that gave a really good reflection of me as a person.  Paragon events were used for all innocent civilians, scared individuals caught in bad situations.  On the other hand, any time an enemy was involved, I used renegade options, having no tolerance or sympathy for their evil ways, gunning downs thugs and monologuing villains alike.  This simple method added tremendous depth and immersion to the game, perfectly complimenting a series in which you design your own character and choose their conversations etc.  On the negative side for that game, I was incredibly annoyed that you couldn’t tell the illusive man where to stick his fancy new space ship.  For a game with so much freedom, it would have been perfect if you could accept the new Normandy, then stick two fingers up at him and get back to Spectre-ing.  Instead you were forced to keep working with someone you know to be a racist villain, and endure unnecessary scorn from your former crew mates and allies.  Throughout the game I was accused of being a member of cerberus and I just wanted to be able to say ‘no, I took his money and his ship and told him to **** off.’
All in all then, what I think games need is a grey area.  We need something that isn’t taken from an episode of captain planet, we need something that reflects the complex nature of mankind.  Game developers need to be sure that if they are adding moral choices into a game, that it is a) required, and b) done well.  If you put in a bad feature, it can bring the whole experience down (Mako in Mass Effect for example), if you are going to do something, do it well, or don’t bother.  Putting in a shallow half arsed system just taunts players with a glimpse of something that could be good, leave it out altogether, and they wouldn’t know to miss it.  All in all I think choices are great in games, moral choices in particular can potentially add a great deal of depth and really draw you in, but they wont suit every game, and whilst it is important to do them right, it is just as important to know when they are appropriate, Street Fighter 5 wouldn’t benefit from choices.  And finally, never give someone the illusion of a choice…