Annoying video game trends: oversimplified morality

October 10, 3:51 AMPittsburgh Video Game ExaminerEric Keihl

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All he needs is a top hat and a moustache to twirl.

If (for some reason) asked, I think most people would agree that video games, despite the best efforts of developers, are a long way from being an accurate simulation of real life. And I'm not just talking about frame rate dips, stilted voice-over work, and demonic invasions of scientific facilities here: there are also some very noticeable differences in the kinds of moral quandries with which we're presented. Now, the idea of giving players ethical choices is all the rage in the video game industry nowadays, and to my mind it's being badly mismanaged. While I think it's great to present players with either/or dilemmas as a way of letting them choose their own destiny, all too often those choices are oversimplfied past the point of absurdity.

Imagine, for example, that you're walking down a dirt path in a forest. You see a man lying on the side of the path. He asks you, in a weak and raspy voice, for just a single sip of water. You've got a bottle of Aquafina in your backpack. Now, in real life you would either give the poor bastard a sip or just chuckle a little at his misfortune and move on. But if you're playing a video game, you're probably going to be given two options like this:

A) Give him the entire bottle of water, throw him over your shoulder, and carry him 26.4 miles on your shoulders to the nearest hospital, where you tuck him into bed yourself, read him Goodnight, Moon, and give him a gentle kiss on the forehead as he falls asleep.

 B) Take out the water bottle, beat him to death with it, drink the water, urinate on his corpse, and ship his rotting and defiled body to his wife via UPS, along with a Hallmark card with a single rose on the front reading "sorry for your loss."

Anybody who's played BioShock (where you're repeatedly given a choice between saving little girls and outright murdering them) will know that this is barely an exaggeration, and that the games where the player is presented with more subtle choices (Deus Ex and Baldur's Gate leap to mind) are alarmingly few and far between. I recently played through inFamous, a game which was excellent overall but whose moral choices basically forced me to be either Norman Borlaug or Charles Manson, with no options in the middle. Given the game's premise (an ordinary man unexpectedly given superpowers in a city plunged into chaos) one would think there'd be all kinds of situations where the long-term consequences were unclear and the terms "good" and "evil" started to lose meaning, but... nope. Everything was pretty cut and dry. Either you served the greater good or you were a selfish dick. You shared a food drop with the people or took all of it for yourself. You defused the bomb or you let the cops blow themselves up. You destroyed the Ultimate MacGuffin of Mass Destruction or used it to redouble your powers. Every choice was cartoonishly black or white, and ultimately it robbed the character of his humanity and the game's story of its effectiveness. This "saint or devil" duality has become a real problem, and something needs to be done.

To be fair, I think the root of the problem has more to do with the concept of morality than with the game developers. Morality is such a subjective and situational idea that I think desginers feel compelled to make it absolutely obvious which choice is good and which evil, so that the gamer doesn't feel cheated or wronged by the game's moral logic. Since I think it's a definite step in the right direction to have games challenge the players' views of right or wrong, my only suggestion would be to stop telling gamers whether their decision is "good" or "evil" alltogether. Instead, just focus on making the consequences as realistic as possible, and let the players decide for themselves if they chose correctly. Respecting people's intelligence may seem like a risky proposition (and it is,) but it's also the surest way to a gamer's heart... aside from explosions. And nudity... and oversized swords, and online multiplayer, and blood, and guns, and pretty colors. And nudity.