Wheel of Morality, Turn Turn Turn...

I’m sure morality in video games could work. I’m certain of it; And though I do enjoy my video games telling me I’m a bad, bad man, I don’t really feel any sort of sense of accomplishment. The morality system in current games makes me feel like I’m some sort of moral caricature, either curling my mustache or stroking my harp. Let’s take a look at some of the problems many, if not all, of the moral systems in video games have.

(Warning: There are some Fable III spoilers in the in this blog post, but don’t let it stop you from reading it. Fable III is a horrible game and you should neither spend your time nor money on it.)

1) There’s only good and bad, nothing in between.

In video games with moral choices, the player either ends up as Satan-Hitler or Jesus-Buddha. Life isn’t just made up of those two. There are so many different kinds of people, like Dicks, and Douches, and Bitches, and Assoholes, and people-who-are-kinda-alright. See? A There’s a whole spectrum of bastards! But game developers are focused on just those extreme ends. As a result, those games have a habit of letting little things add up and being just as important as one big thing, to make sure that the player is always at one end of the spectrum. Life doesn’t work that way. I can’t force a woman at gunpoint to abort her baby, during her second trimester, on stage in front of a judgmental audience and then, to make amends, give her cupcakes in the morning for a whole year. There is no other game guiltier of these sins than the Fable franchise, specifically Fable 2.

Granted, Fable 2 is a buggy mess, where the player wins by mashing the A button, and it still doesn’t fulfill half of the promises Molyneux made for the original Fable, but I still enjoyed it. One day, I, the hero of Albion, walked into the town square of Bowerstone, and suddenly every straight woman and gay man flocked around me, demanding that I “complete their quests” (*wink*). Being a happily married man with a daughter and several gorgeous mistresses, I declined their offers and walked away. Most of them seemed to understand that I wanted nothing to do with them and left me alone, but one nympho, peasant woman kept stalking me. Attempting to escape I accidently killed her with my sword. Suddenly, my fan club turned and became a mob, screaming and yelling at me, until I was the most hated man in Albion. I realized I made a big mistake and that it was going to take a lot of work to make things right.

So I had my character fart for five minutes. Fable 2 allows the player the do expressions, like flexing or laughing. I chose to have my character fart for five minutes. Why? Because I knew afterwards, the town would love me again.

I can accept that there are trolls and rock monsters in the game, but a bunch of farts making murder OK is just too ridiculous, even for me. Developers need to understand that people aren’t just good or bad; that it’s ok if they’re in the undefined gray area, and that every “moral” choice shouldn’t automatically make me the definition of good or bad.

2) Flawed Ethical Rules

In the “Computer Ethics and Society” course I took last semester, I learned a variety of ethical theories. In class, we were required to apply said theories to various ethical dilemmas to see that ethics are gray, not black and white. I’m just going to use two of them to analyze Fable III:

Rule Utilitarianism: The right thing to do is to follow rules, and breaking them is wrong (assuming following those rules makes the world a better place)

Act Utilitarianism: If one’s actions produce greater good, the person is morally right, but if said actions make things worse, the person is morally wrong.

Fable III is a terrible video game that was released for the Xbox 360 last year. You play as a nameless prince whose dick older brother, the new King of all of Albion, kicks you out of the castle. You then work with the rebels to defeat your brother and become the king. Along your journey, you discover these weird shadow monsters, The Children, who are essentially the embodiment of all evil and fear, and their leader, the Crawler, whose goal is (I didn’t see it coming) destroying the world. Turns out, they’re going to attack Albion in a year and the player has prepare the kingdom for said attack, and during that year, the player has to make “tough” ethical decisions.

The problem with this section of the game is that it is using a flawed version of Rule Utilitarianism. One of the moral choices the player has to make is whether to raise taxes, keep them where they are, or lower them; raises taxes is the bad option, keeping them where they are is neutral, and lowering them is good. The game is idealistic to a fault. No one likes being taxed, but that money goes to improve the kingdom, or in this case, to save their fucking lives. What’s worse is not only do all the regal decisions follow this inept logic, but the people’s opinion on you is also reliant on that logic. So, if you keep all your promises, like not raising the taxes, thereby allowing the Crawler to wipe out 99% of Albion, that remaining 1% will think you’re a great king, but if you break all your promises, allowing you to prevent genocide, the citizens will loathe you. It’s like the people of Albion is some sort of judgmental mother and nothing you could ever do would please her.

If the game instead went with Act Utilitarianism, or even Rule Utilitarianism that thought about how the rules would affect the country in the big picture, it would make so much more sense. Raising taxes would be good because said taxes are being used to stop the worst thing in the history of every Fable game that has ever been or will ever be from happening. Once the threat is over, the player could just lower the taxes, end child labor laws, etc. But no! That would be too easy. The game has to follow the incorrect Rule Utilitarianism, so it can force the player to make those “tough” choices because by making the ethical problems “tough”, it some how makes the game deeper. You know what would the moral choices deeper and more powerful? Having whoever is directing/writing the game take an ethics course. That would show that the developer did some research and show that there was some genuine, academic thought put behind the game.

3) Nothing really matters anyway

If the game gives the player actual moral choices, that means said moral choices must affect the actual game itself. If that does happen, then that means that there are various different endings.

What to do then?

A) Some developers decide to set their sequel in a different area with different characters. Some games that use this technique include Resident Evil II and the Fallout franchises.

B) Other developers set their sequel FAR into the future. An example of this is the Fable franchise, where, Fable 2 is set hundreds of years after the original Fable.

C) And let’s not forget the option of declaring one of the game’s multiple endings as canon, thereby making the other ending’s “what ifs” scenarios, like Resident Evil II did.

These options I listed above are not solutions. They are sloppy attempts at trying to fix the problem of multiple endings that moral choices tend to produce. Setting all the sequels in different location doesn’t deal with the problem; it’s just avoiding it really well, like that one time in the Simpsons where they polluted Springfield so much they literally moved the town several miles over.

Setting your sequels in the far future is also a terrible idea because it makes the game’s inhabitants stupid beyond belief. In the first Fable game, the player’s character (the PC) saves Albion. Fable 2 is set hundreds of years in the future and they have no idea what kind of person the main character was in the original Fable game. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief for that, but not when Fable 3, set, like, 30 years after Fable 2, does the same thing. In Fable 3, the PC’s father, the former king, recently passed away, but no one in Albion has no memory of what kind of person he was before he became king. Granted, they knew he saved the world, but they remember NOTHING else. They don’t remember the time he killed a woman in the middle of the town’s square and farted on her corpse for five minutes, nor do they remember how he charged practically nothing for renting any building he owned.

And declaring one of the endings as canon is bullshit. The player has no idea which ending is the real one until the publisher is about the release the sequel. Spending 10+ hours playing a game only to find out that you didn’t really play the REAL story is infuriating and a waste of time.

But the overall problem with options A, B, and C is that it makes what I’ve done in the previous game meaningless. The game tells me that I’m saving the world, but it doesn’t feel like that. If I really did save the world, wouldn’t people remember it, regardless how far away it occurred or that it happened a hundred years ago? It’s like I’m working on a group project that will “save the world” and the game’s developer tells me that he has given me the most important task of all: straightening all the paperclips in the office. It’s belittling and a waste of time.

And what’s worse is that nearly every game I can think of with moral systems, and, as a result, different endings, that do the above things in an attempt to patch everything together. I’m going to list some games I have not played and know very little about, and I’m going to assume they fall into the traps I’ve written about: Mass Effect 2, Infamous 2, and Dragon Age 2. Am I right?

The only solution I can think of is making the game, and supporting it through DLC/updates, like Valve does with Team Fortress 2. This way, the story continues and what I do in the game has actual repr-

I just realized something. I’ve never made a game. I mean I’ve made video games for class projects and personal stuff, but I’ve never worked on a professional game like Fable 3 the Fallout games. I never even considered that there might be hardware issues or illogical publisher demands. You know what? I’m sorry for judging you unfairly, game developers. But I still have one, small, simple issue I think you can do with ease, and it will allow you to ignore all of the problems I mentioned above.

4) Why can’t I play as a pedophile in a video game!?

Really. Why can’t I do this? Nobody likes pedophiles. Not even pedophiles! Think about it: when have you ever seen a pedophile hanging out with other pedophiles? Never. And on cop shows, they always talk about how they have to keep the pedophile away from the other prisoners in jail because the fellow inmates would kill him. That’s powerful stuff: when thieves, murderers, sociopaths, and even rapists say that something is unethical, you know that pedophiles are just pure evil.

So, let’s look at a hypothetical situation. You’re playing a game that has given you a choice between either molesting a child or not molesting a child. It’s a black and white moral choice that works with stupid video game logic and real life logic. Plus, the game will get a bunch of media exposure for allowing you to molest children, so the game will get amazing marketing for free. And sequels aren’t an issue because when compared with saving the world, feeling up a choirboy is nothing, so if you go to a different location or far into the future, it would make perfect sense that no one would remember a child molester. Creating such a game would make all my complaints null and void. It’s a win-win for everyone involved!

So, TL;DR, here’s what I want in games with moral choices:

1) Give me shades of gray

2) Use logical ethical theories

3) Make my decisions matter

4) Let me play as a pedophile in a video game

Bioware/Bethesda/Lionhead: Don’t let me down!