Morality in video games, part 1

I've been watching my brother play inFamous for the PS3. It seems like a pretty great game- good story, interesting combat, excellent use of free-roaming ablities.

The one thing it doesn't really excel at is probably the most hyped feature of the game- the morality choices. Giving the player the choice to be good or evil has been around for awhile, but mostly in the medium of western RPGs like Knights of the Old Republic. Lately it's entered the mainstream in a big way, but almost none of the games usng the idea seem to be doing anything interesting with it. Here are some ways I think the concept could be improved:

There are more than two sides to every story

inFamous isn't exactly subtle about it's choices. In fact you get a big preamble spelling out what exactly what it is you can do, and in each case there are two and only two choices- for example, kill some starving civilians to get more food for yourself, or only take as much as you need.

Really? Is that seriously the only way that situation could have resolved itself? Why can't I not kill anyone but take the food anyway? Or threaten to kill some people instead of actually doing it?

GTA IV had an interesting scenario where you were put in the situation of having to choose to kill one of two characters at the request of the other, both of whom were quite sympathetic. Even here though, why do I have to kill either of them? Why can't I just tell them both to resolve their dispute themselves? If writers made an effort to depict situations where the main character was realistically and believably forced into only having two options that would be one thing (and I'll give an example of such a situation later), but that almost never seems to happen.

Don't tell the player which choice is right and which is wrong

inFamous does another annoying thing in relation to it's choices- you are explicitly told which decision is the right one and which is wrong, in the most obvious and ham-fisted way possible. And of course, there's a little morality meter to quantify exactly how much of an asshole/saviour you are.

Why is this needed? Why not let the player choose for themselves which course of action is the right one? Why not get rid of the morality bar and let the consequences speak for themselves?

Of course, even if this was done it wouldn't matter much because....

Shades of grey do not exist, apparently


Ignore everything else I've just written- this is the crux of the problem. In video games your actions are either the vilest, most depraved evil or you're a selfless paragon of virtue. Where a third alternative does exist it's usually to simply do nothing. 

News flash: this is not how the world works. In real life people find themselves having to choose between the lesser of two evils far more often than they choose between two totally polar opposites. Realistic situations in which you're forced to make an agonizing decision between two undesirable outcomes have been done (see Fable 2's infamous final decision), and have been widely praised for it. Why don't more games have this?

Although that said, there's still the matter of....

Consequences

This is the last stumbling block, and probably the one that frustrates me more than anything else, even if it's not the worst thing a game can do in regards to morality, so I'm giving it special attention here.

So you've been faced with this big epic choice between good and evil, and you make your choice, and then.... what? In most situations, a little bar in your status screen goes up or down a notch, or you get a different amount of items then if you had made a different choice.

Well, that was harrowing.

I think the main problem here is that in video games you're usually acting as a free agent- if the consequences of your actions affect anyone at all, it's some faceless NPCs you just met. Decisions that affect major characters, like that bit in Mass Effect with the bomb (if you've played the game you know what I'm talking about) are good, but you can't do that too much unless you want to run out of characters too quickly.

I've been playing Sins of A Solar Empire lately, and whether or not my ships get blown up illicits way more of an emotional response than any moral choice in a game ever has. So how about this: a game where you play as the leader of a group of refugees fleeing a much more powerful enemy, lets say in a spaceship in a sci-fi setting. You're presented with the following scenario: you and your people are cornered and the only way to break out of the situation is to take action that will result in a large number of enemy civilians being killed. On the other hand, if you do nothing a small number of your own people will die. Ideally the game would have a large number of fully fleshed out characters who are incidental to the plot, and you know if you choose not to kill the civilians some of them will die. Situations like this would crop up often, with the choice being between acting ruthlessly or losing characters. You could decide to be an idealistic paragon of virtue, there would be nothing stopping you, but by the time you got to the end of the game you'd have no characters left.

I really think taking away autonomy and having the burden of other people's safety on the player's shoulders is the way forward here. There's an excellent flash game called Last Stand 2 where you barricade yourself in against zombies. You can pick up survivor allies and use them to search for weapons and supplies, which are vital to winning. But the more you do, the greater the chance of one of them dying. You don't get to see it happening or anything, but I always felt a moment of trepidation when the report on the day's activities came in in case there was anything greater than a zero in the "survivors killed" box.

(I'll have nore to say about this soon)