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Published:
2016-02-08 21:53:41
Imported:
2021-03

Content

Hey everyone. Let's have a quick chat about morality in games.

I think we can all agree that that traditional karma system - "do you want to save an orphan from a fire or kick a puppy in the face?" - is a bit lacking. It's binary, reductive, and your choices often take place in isolated sequences, away from the main mechanics.


In my next video I want to talk about some recent(ish) indie games that explore the topic of morality in a far more nuanced way - and embed their "moral choices" into the very mechanics of the game.


I'll be talking about Undertale, and how you have to sacrifice XP and health to be a good person. And Papers, Please, which creates a cruel system that will slowly turn you corrupt. And Darkest Dungeon, where you have to do some pretty uncomfortable things to get ahead.


This is a tricky thing to discuss - it strays outside of pure design and into narrative and analytical topics - and while I'm closing in on finishing up the script, I would really like to get your thoughts on a few things.


I guess my questions to you are:


What do you look for in a morality system? Tough choices? Meaningful changes in the story? Gameplay rewards? Something else?


If a game makes it easy to be evil, and hard to be good (i.e. you get XP for killing monsters, and nothing for pacifying them), what can that game offer to make it worth your while to be a good person?


Have you played a game that tackled morality in a meaningful way? Or one that totally ballsed it up?


Any ideas, thoughts, or opinions on this subject would be very appreciated!


Cheers, Mark.

(P.S. Wow! Nearly 300 Patrons! Ridiculous!)

Files

Comments

Anonymous

When I know I can use saves to alter my choices and outcomes it really detaches my from a game. I love the fallout out series but I also love achievements. So when I manipulated saves to get specific Karma related achievement I felt like I hadn't played the game 'properly'. The moral choices are there to immerse you more but giving choice based achievements and allowing easy save states can be too tempting focus on meaning immersion is lost. I love Papers Please purely because it frustrates the hell out of me. I genuinely play that game with a certain level of stress as I'm forced to choose between 'right' and 'wrong'. I'd also say part of the challenge in papers please is trying to stay on the straight and narrow for as long as possible, it's as if the game is built to push your buttons until you end up on its many different endings whereas Fallout is a bit of a clean slate with a straight forward story that always concludes in the same place in one or two ways with the illusion of 'choice' along the way.

Anonymous

I really enjoy games with multiple streaks of morality, I like exploring the binary options as much as I enjoy nuanced games. I remember playing Fable three times back to back to see what it was like being good, evil and neutral. I think that created it's own little effect for me. I think it's how Morality is handled and how I connect myself to the game on a game-to-game basis. Games like Fable since they are so binary make me feel like it's whatever. But Telltale Games usually make me think a little harder and connect me more. *Spoilers about Walking Dead Below* The best moments that make me feel the most about morality in games are the moments when I have to make my decision under pressure. When I'm playing a game through the first time and have this fresh unexpected feeling it really makes me feel bad. In the first episode of season 1 when you had to choose between Doug and (had to look it up) Carly and my instinct was to save the girl first. I stopped playing for a little bit and really wondered if I chose her because the gun was next to her or because she was a girl. Technically, Doug saved the day and without him we wouldn't get out of the pharmacy, but I barely hesitated to save Carly and it really made me think. The other one is more about character building but the season finale of WDS2 when a certain character resurfaced and you spend so many episodes with this person to have to play party to their death just upset me. I didn't even like the person but you spend so much time with them that when they go, part of you goes too you know? *SPOILERS OVER* I hope that helps but I think that's really the key to tackling meaningful morality in video games. When you take away the conscious thought and see what the player does as the character in a split second. Where you have to rationalize between whether or not you made the choice or whether you made the choice for the character.

CrimsonTentacles

Like many people, I get pretty bored when games tackle morality the same way as the real life, meaning "be good and we will reward you". Often games close some paths from you for making "wrong" choices which is ultimate bs ("you cant kill this character or else you wont have some interesting quests or such"). Lately I mainly play and analyze Bioware games and I have two points to make about their morality systems. First: how Bad and Good ways seems very different but often objectively looks the same: they both are based on violence but Good path is just violence supported by law and order. Two: I actually like how they evolved from clearly bad/good paths from KOTOR and Mass Effect into more subtle system based more on approval of your companions (there is always someone approving your actions, which feels more real and genuine). What I would love to have in the morality department is either more equal approach to "sides" - bad people face consequences, but being good does not mean only happines, sunshine and rainbows, losses are often equal, OR creating a "morality" system that is extremely different and takes actual effort to recognize and apply its rules to behavior.

Anonymous

You need to play lisa the painful. That games morality is really grey. It gives you choices which i don't want to spoil but really hurt either way

Ben C

I haven't played a lot the interesting recent morality choice games. I typically go Paragon though even though the rewards are often equal or worse to the Renegade options in most games. For instance in Mass Effect, you can choose to be bad and get some really funny story moments that are otherwise pretty dull on the good guy side. The only penalty is your Shepard starts to get evil scar things but you can even pay to get those removed it doesn't matter much. Being good might mean NPCs are a bit friendlier but the direct interactions are almost always more enjoyable renegade style. That being said I've heard anecdotally from a lot of people that they almost always choose one option regardless of the pros and cons. I think it really comes from why and how people play games. I like being the hero but an escapist might prefer evil since the game world has no repercussion on the real one. I play games for the story. So a good morality system, in my opinion, is all about the persistence of your decisions. Though not a straight morality system, Shadows of Mordor had a really interesting sounding persistence model in they way the enemies that survived encounters with you could come back to seek vengeance, with scars and dialogue specific to your last encounter with them. On the other end of the spectrum, MMOs often have you go on (supposedly) world shattering quests but the game world can permanently alter due to your decisions becomes it's shared with all the other players who might not be at that point in the story yet.

Fabian

I am often annoyed by dialogue choices that only paraphrase the conversation or action that they trigger. Some examples can be found in The Wolf Among Us. It happened quite a few times that I chose a direction, only to realize in horror that I hadn't considered *that* interpretation ... What I really liked about TWAU though were the complex characters, where even dark characters hadn't been "evil" from the start, but got pushed on that path by their fate - something you only discover if you decide to be patient in conversations and try to look behind the mask. Regarding morality systems like in Undertale: While I haven't explored the genocide route, I really like the idea that the emotional impact of your choices is emphasized to a maximum, something that other games lack far too often (e.g. when you come back from a killing spree and NPCs don't even twitch an eye).

Anonymous

Karma system in Fallout 2 is something I still hold as a great template for a morality system: player character through their actions affect how the world reacts to them: shoot a child, dig a grave, slaughter a camp of bandits, rob a whole village, shag everything that moves, and the word react. I wish actions spoke louder than words in more games, and choices had lasting repercussions, but I suspect that can be achieved only by ditching aspirations for grand cinematic narrative in favour of more elaborate systems. Spend less time on those dialog trees that decide whether my character is good or bad, and more time on tracking my actions to decide which NPCs will shoot them on sight, stab them in the back, or agree to marry them (and then divorce them, because they cheated).

Anonymous

Undertale flipped the perspectives of RPGs because it is at its best when you're not butchering enemies! The fable games were my first taste of the morality compass, I can't remember any of the perks other than appearance though for that! The walking dead ones were awful because it first made you think that you had a say in what you did but the only thing that happened was someone else remembered it

Anonymous

Excellent choice of topic Mark. With most games featuring player choices the easy way out is to say "save the baby vs eat the baby". Those kind of choices feel almost meaningless. What does feel important to me is where characters are impacted by what I choose but also that they make me feel something for having done what I just did. If I didn't reverse the genophage in Mass Effect 3 I would feel like shit about having betrayed my Krogan friends. With many "morality games" I purposefully only play it once and try to truly make that playthrough my own. Whatever I do is what happens and the choices I didn't pick don't matter as they never happened. I enjoy feeling like I make my own canon. With a couple of exceptions this is how I played through Mass Effect, Dragon Age, The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us etc. When games reduce it down to a single choice at the end I do actually seek out the alternate endings on YouTube.

Anonymous

Not to go all academic but this guy has some interesting research on "Morality in the Magic Circle" so to speak... <a href="http://www.indiana.edu/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.indiana.edu/</a>~telecom/people/faculty/weaver.shtml "Moral choice in video games. My interest in the appeal of media violence has expanded into thinking about what happens in video games when players are given choices about their violent activity. This, in turn, has led to a few new research projects on moral choice in games. I'm especially interested in why players make the choices they do (e.g., are they guided by real-world moral codes, do they adopt the moral code of the narrative they've entered, or do they disregard morality in the game environment altogether?). I'm also interested in how the moral (or immoral) choices players make impact their enjoyment of and emotional reactions to the game."

Anonymous

I would prioritize making moral decisions feel weighty rather than offer too many options and branching paths, mostly because it's nearly impossible to make a game where every decision takes you in a new direction. Telltale's games and Life is Strange come to mind in that where you end up is largely going to be one a few paths, but the moment-to-moment decision-making is challenging in and of itself. It helps that the choices don't just boil down to good and bad either. You might not know where the decision is going to lead, so you might have to go with your gut and see how it plays out, and I think that makes it matter a lot more, in my experience at least. That said, if the game is going to reward you for choosing a certain path, they should at least not punish you by making one path offer greater rewards. Bioshock comes to mind, since saving the little sisters was more rewarding in the long run than harvesting them. As above, maybe Infamous: Second Son, too; I've heard the "villain" path gives you much better powers. (side note: a replayed a bit of this recently, and while I chose to be good last time, you better believe I sacrificed that tribe this go around)

DMG

My thoughts on this have been strongly influenced by Alexander M. Freed's Gamasutra piece "Developing Meaningful Player Character Arcs in Branching Narrative" <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/188950/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/188950/</a> There he talks about putting the player's values in conflict. Undertale does this one way, where the value I place on being merciful conflicts with the value I place on power/survival/completion (full disclosure: I haven't finished it yet because I need more practice in bullet hell to be able to survive according to my moral aspirations) - but there's still a choice that I consider unambiguously "right," and the conflict is merely practical. There's another type of conflict for which the best example I know is Mass Effect's "A House Divided" mission (spoilers follow) <a href="http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Legion:_A_House_Divided" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Legion:_A_House_Divided</a> where the choice to kill the heretics en masse or to forcibly rewrite them are both abhorrent on some level - mass murder or mind controlled slavery - so I face a conflict even to decide which is more consistent with the morality I'm playing. (The arbitrary labels of Paragon and Renegade somewhat detract from this moral ambiguity, in my opinion. As Benjamin Chirlin points out below it encourages making decisions based on identity/tribal labels - "I'm a Paragon player" - rather than consideration of individual consequences) The end of Life is Strange has a similar conflict, where both options have something I strongly value, but since it's more recent I won't go into detail here. ;) The other major point I appreciated in Freed's article was the call to give players means to express their turmoil through their interactions in the game, so it has a tangible existence beyond their own heads. Much as it frustrated me, "the Serpent" in the Talos Principle might be an interesting example of this, where it gives players an active participant with (against) whom to debate a complex issue, and articulate a position or belief that's richer than "yes" or "no." I liked when Bastion contextualized the player running around smashing every breakable object in sight (probably just to get collectibles) in terms of this kind of inner turmoil: "Kid just rages a while..." - (spoilers follow) but I was sad to see it give very limited means to express turmoil over their relationship to the Ura. When I played, I made a deliberate choice to use only the shield against Ura soldiers (which can only damage them if they're attacking you), to express a kind of non-violent resistance, a refusal to stand idly by but also a refusal to perpetuate the Caels' oppression and violence toward them. To say "I'll make peace if you'll meet me there." But so far as I could see there wasn't even one line of narration that paid recognition to this type of play, or the moral position I was trying to express. Still an awesome game, but it left me feeling like I had less meaningful input than the game gave me the means to offer.

Anonymous

I find the weakest element of a lot of morality systems is that they tend to force you down a pure good or pure evil route. For example mass effect and fallout both have perks for players that go entirely one way or the other. So there is no real reward for evaluating each situation as it comes up. You are sort of locked in to one path. For all the things it got wrong, I loved the way Alpha Protocol dealt with this. You could be a tough guy when talking to a villain but also be nice when talking to colleagues. It gave you different rewards for handling the situations in the way you wanted to role play

Anonymous

What I look for most in a morality system is the game forcing me to think about how my decisions will affect me, the world, and the characters I am travelling with. Honestly gameplay rewards and "tough choices" mean nothing to me if I do not see the impact it has on the setting I have immersed myself in. Also this needs to be a process that happens in game and not at towards the end or in some credit sequence, Undertale and Fallout New Vegas do this brilliantly for example. To answer your second question, the game only has to acknowledge (in whatever way possible) the decisions I have made throughout that playthrough. It does not have to be a positive or a negative acknowledgment, the game has to make sure that the player is aware of the actions they are making. Well for starters Undertale is a great example of morality tacked right. I would also include Spec Ops: The Line, Fallout: New Vegas (the karma system is non existent really), The Walking Dead (Season 1, ignore Season 2), This War of Mine, and Dead State (game does not really reward or punish you for the decisions you make). There are many more I would like to include but then this list would take forever. On the other hand, Always Sometimes Monsters, Survivalist, Dishonored, Fallout 4, and any of the Bioshock games are examples of games that either pretended the narrative was about morality or just didn't implement it well whatsoever. I think one thing you should focus on is how game mechanics can distract or clash with the moral narrative.

GameMakersToolkit

Woah! Thanks everyone - that's really helpful. Thank you for putting so much thought into your answers! Keep em coming if anyone has more

Vesselin Jilov

JUDGE DREDD I think one of the games that best handled morality through pure, dynamic gameplay is a low budget, low quality, simplistic shooter called Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death. I haven't even played the full game, just the demo, but it impressed me so much that I bought it twice. You're a cop in an authoritarian state. How do you express that in gameplay? PSYCHOLOGY The most amazing thing in Judge Dredd was that your enemies could get scared, get desperate, and surrender. If they see most of their buddies are killed, or if you shoot them in the hands (and they drop their weapon), or if they start feeling threatened in other ways, and they are not religious zealots, they surrender. You can arrest them or kill them. CONSEQUENCES Even though you are a cop / judge / executioner, you can't be randomly evil forever. You can be ruthless, but there's a tolerance for how ruthless you can be. If you kill too many people without a reason, it's like GAME OVER - BUT the game doesn't end without explanation. Instead, you remain in the level, but you can't progress in the story, and all other judges are sent by HQ to deal with you - they are coming for your head. That was the most beautiful solution I have seen in a game to allow you to have freedom of expression, but if you go out of character too much, the game doesn't end - the story and the progression end. You can still play, you still exist, you just chose to not be Judge Dredd - therefore all story and event triggers are disabled, and society is powerful enough to crush you for your crimes in the game itself. LAYERS OF VIOLENCE You can arrest random people for ridiculous reasons "possessing a hamster without a license", "drinking coffee in an unassigned area", "forbidden literature", etc. To arrest, you threaten them with words that you say, mapped to an "arrest / threaten" button. In response, people may surrender or attack you, but it gives the impression that every enemy attacks you for a real reason (they respond to your attempt to imprison them), not just because they saw you. Threatening, bluff are very often used most of the time by people and animals in the real world to avoid actual confrontation, but in games we don't use them much because we like power fantasies. Disarming enemies and incapacitating them in Judge Dredd is also a layer of violence that's below the extreme, deadly violence - and if you arrest absolutely every enemy instead of killing them, the game gives you the highest rank, JUDGE DREDD. This is not exactly handling complex moral situations (even though there are scenes in the game where you'll question what you're doing) but rather, expressing a story and a character that we don't get to see in games often (a story and a character that don't necessarily say "KILL EVERYONE") and depicting that through gameplay. Ubisoft's I'm Alive also did layers of violence, but didn't do it so well, because everything was too scripted and could only be done in one way, almost no player choice involved.

Vesselin Jilov

BULLY Undertale gets praised for its nuanced interactions, but I think most people overlooked similar games that dared to use threats, insults, apologies, and layered violence, instead of deadly violence only. For example, nobody can die in Rockstar's Bully, but this somehow makes the game more realistic. Death is something very serious and extreme, and games usually take it lightly and devaluate it. It's so weird, but characters in Bully feel more real because they don't die left and right. Bully also does layered violence. Jimmy Hopkins can do hand-to-hand combat, but he can also threaten / insult or be nice / apologize. So, humiliation or verbal attacks are also an option, not just brutal fighting. This creates social situations, like a mission in which you have to protect someone from being insulted / humiliated (not beaten up, you actually protect her self-esteem!). You can also get out of a fight by apologizing and accepting humiliation. You can see the same layered system in emergent situations - for example a nurse NPC trying to get a crazy granny NPC back into the asylum; the nurse doesn't want to attack the granny physically, instead he can use mild threats instead of violence, and the granny mocks the nurse instead of using violence. Bully doesn't intentionally adress moral issues, but if you really try to roleplay this, you get to do quick choices like getting out of your way to help someone who's bullied, instead of trying to quickly finish your main mission before it's time for you to sleep or go to class. Again, Bully is not an example of handling morality, it doesn't deliberately do the stuff that it does, but it is an example of adding nuance and psychological interactions, which in turn can allow to have actual moral choices in a game (not in a cut-scene). Bully just tried to incorporate a character and his situation into the actual gameplay without resorting to the typical approach games use, and this IMO is the base we need for actual morality in a game.

Anonymous

I personally look for meaningful changes, because if I end up knowing that my choices didn't rly matter, then I will definitely not care as muchv (looking at you, the Walking Dead). I might be tempted to explore options I would never go for in games w a morality system if making that choice has an impact not only on the story, but also the gameplay. For instance, in LISA, the player is faced with a pretty brutal decision early in the game. You can either let Terry Hintz, the tutorial character, die but keep all the inventory items you worked hard for, or let Terry live and have him join your party but give up all of your belongings. This is interesting because I chose to keep Terry alive, but now the game is way more difficult because I lost all of my money and items and Terry is actually not a very good character to have in your party. He has some good stats growth but he's a just ok a healer/buffer (where I am in the game at least). So the choice is not only moral, but also truly affects how you will play the game from that point onwards. And in my case, I feel kind of bad for doing the right thing. One extra thing I will add about undertale is that the game remembers what you did, so doing bad things will "taint" your save file, which you probably heard of before. But a thing I find more interesting is that some rly good content and extra details about the characters and the story are available to the player *only* if they can bring themselves to go down that path and kill absolutely everything in the game (which is time consuming and also from what I've seen, a pretty disturbing experience). I personally couldn't bring myself to do it, even though I am aching to try and win the extra hard boss battles of the no mercy run.

GameMakersToolkit
>>1342207

That's really interesting, cheers Vesselin. I'm always after games that offer non-violent options and I forgot Bully had that stuff. I'll keep it in mind for future vids!

Anonymous

In a morality system I search for a game that makes the ambiance feel different according to my choices. I would like to build a personality for myself through an avatar and I want NPCs to treat me according to my moral choices. I haven't played a game like this although I heard Mass Effect does something like this. If anyone has any game like this please suggest, you'd do me a huge favor. Next, regarding this: "If a game makes it easy to be evil, and hard to be good (i.e. you get XP for killing monsters, and nothing for pacifying them), what can that game offer to make it worth your while to be a good person?". I think a game should bait you into thinking that there is no consequence in killing monsters at first, but as you play this certain type of monster you slaughtered would bring the rest of its family/clan who would be significantly stronger than you and they would prevent you from advancing through certain areas unless you pacify them, or beat them but the latter would be hard/impossible. Or the game could step it up a notch and make your decisions irreversible, so that means if you slaughtered a certain clan it would be impossible to pacify them again and that would force the player to manage how many monsters of a certain clan they kill and which type of clan to fight and which to forge an alliance with, it would add another layer in role playing and would go with my first point: creating a personality through an avatar. I find the general solution to the problem of players not caring what actions and attitude they have towards the game is making their action irreversible, because in most games it is possible to save and restart if they don't like a certain decision. If a game autosaves and doesn't let you change your actions AND the NPCs around would changes their attitudes towards the players depending on his actions, then players would think twice about being good or evil in this game.

Lucas

Unfortunately I don't got the time right now to talk in a deep way about morale in games (I am really, really looking forward to this video!), but I came here to say that this video CANNOT exist without a This War of Mine reference. :)

GameMakersToolkit
>>1351698

Yes, you're totally right - I've actually been revisiting it this week. Can't believe I almost forgot about it!

Anonymous

The Dragon Age games do some interesting things with morality. One thing they do consistently is not have a karma meter, and instead just have party member approval. So that way they can actually do some more grey moral choices, since they don't have to declare one side "good". DA2 did some really great stuff with companion approval. Origins and Inquisition made it so that you always want to have your companions like you, but in DA2 they changed it so that what you really want is for your party members to have consistent strong feelings about your choices, good or bad. You can choose whether to make a party member a "friend" or a "rival", and both are completely valid choices for each party member. You can even still romance a party member who is being rivaled, and it makes the romance develop differently.

Casey Jones

1) The tougher the choices a game offers, the more stressed out I get about playing it. I stopped playing Walking Dead S1 after 3 episodes, as my anxiety about being responsible for keeping Clementine safe rose to a point where it was easier to just NOT play the game. The same thing happened in Life Is Strange, where even though in episode 2 I was able to talk Kate down from the ledge, I was so shocked after realizing that many players didn't, that I became anxious about future chapters and tough choices that lay ahead, and what damage I could possibly do to those around me. I never played beyond that point, even though I loved everything I'd played until that point. 2) The binary reward/penalty options for a morality system have grown tired. In order to really entice me to play one way or the other, it would be nice if the good/evil choices led to significantly different scenes or content. This would also make me want to play through the game again to see all of the content there was to offer. 3) Firewatch offered a good in-between where the moral choices do almost nothing but change how you as a player inject yourself into the game world, with very little in-game consequence. The consequences were all internal, and let you conduct yourself as the kind of person you were willing to be. That was pretty cool, because it did a lot to colour my interpretation of the game's story, since I was taking into account my character's place within it.

Anonymous

Hey! Personally I always prefer having choices that affect the world/narrative in a meaningful way AND how I interact with it. For example Dragon Age Origins was marketed as a game where your decisions had real effect on the plot, it really wasn't that type of game. After first playthrough it gave me that feeling yes, but it was just an illusion. During my second playthrough I actually decided to test the system and in plenty moments, no matter what I did, the game still progressed in a direction that I didn't want to go. The message was clear to me - if you make the choices we would like you to make, then you will feel the game follows and you will be satisfied. If not, then sorry, we did our best. I understood that the creators had their production limits and that they had to close all the gaps to make sure that the player gets where they want him in the end. I also appreciate that they created that illusion of "your decisions are important!" that made me like the game very much at first, but it really made me sad that I was lied to. I moved the curtain, saw the mechanisms and the magic was gone.