-12 year-old boy, approaching the Gamestop clerk with Call of Duty 4 in hand, mother in tow. Your parental controls at work!

Newman | No Comments »

Last time I checked, there’s no metric by which people can constantly measure their moral worth. Judging the goodness in one’s self is not as simple as reading your fuel gauge.

So why do video games make it that easy?

Mass Effect, Fallout 3 and InFamous — all of which inject morality into a medium that deals primarily in wins and losses — present the player with a kindness meter, accessible at any time, like the entire game is played in the presence of St. Peter. They even take it a step further by alerting players to their “right” and “wrong” decisions. Karma meter goes up, karma meter goes down.

Moral gauges are a cheap way of coping with gaming’s inherent black-and-white nature. Instead of presenting the player with morally gray areas, the system is broken into 1’s and 0’s, accumulating one way or another until the game’s character is decidedly good or evil. (A third option, in some cases, is “Neutral,” which accomplishes nothing.) But the real problem is that the player knows about it.

Yahtzee says video game morals fail because players must either “sing the orphans to sleep or murder their dogs, with no middle ground.” He’s right, but I don’t agree with his argument that video game morals need to “drink some paint and retard themselves out of existence.” There’s room for improvement here, and it starts by abolishing the moral barometer.

Most players, I believe, are inclined to enter a moral choice game knowing which side is for them. That’s certainly how I do it (always the good guy, natch), and I hear comments from others to the effect of “I’m playing as evil this time around.”

That decision would be harder if the player couldn’t tell what’s wrong or right. Consider, for example, a segment in Mass Effect where the player must choose to kill off a potentially dangerous alien species or risk humanity by letting the aliens live. It’s a great dilemma, but in a system where players know to strive for good or evil the decision becomes a lot easier. The player no longer has to weigh the consequences (there aren’t any, but more on that in a moment) because the decision lies solely in whether there are Paragon or Renegade points to be gained.

A necessary ingredient for successfully removing moral gauges is gray area. The more ambiguous a dilemma is, the harder the choice will be for players — unless there’s a convenient meter that reads their decision back as data, undermining the choice’s unknowns.

So without moral gauges, how will players know the consequences of their actions? By putting actual consequences into the game, of course (and I’m not the first to argue this). Fallout 3 does change the world somewhat to fit the player character’s personality, which makes it all the more strange that a Karma meter still exists. Once this crutch is removed, decision-making in video games will be a Hell of a lot more interesting.

Newman | No Comments »