Moral struggle? Yeah right.

I apologize ahead of time (and after the fact) for the abundant "use" of air quotes.

While I have played many games where I have had the option of doing good and doing evil, I have never played a game that made me feel comfortable being the bad guy. Playing Bioware, Bethesda, and Lionhead games in the past, I have never been happy doing the "evil thing". The moral choices that the player has to make in these games often seem artificial and obvious. While broadcasting, I'm frequently told to do something "evil" to see the funnier consequences on my actions, and while the results can often lead to some excellent clips, this is not the kind of moral struggle I'm craving for in my RPGs. I want my questionable actions to feel necessary.

In a lot of ways, Fallout 3 suffers from the same problem as any of these other wannabe moral choice games. Choosing to blow up a town just to be a dick is hardly interesting to me. I have no out-of-game motivation to commit such a heinous act. The world of Fallout is dark and depressing and the only light is found in my few good deeds. I do indeed want to see the fallout of big actions like these, but I would never be "evil" in my first play-through of the game.

This is probably because "evil" is not all that interesting to me. By definition, "evil" doesn't have the player making hard choices; instead the aim of an evildoer is to perform immoral acts without much consideration for good. Where is the compelling struggle? Give me Michael from The Wire, not Michael from Halloween.

How about not making the consequences of our actions so obvious? If saving an innocent person from a gang of ruffians didn't always lead to infinite good, then maybe we would really question how we make our in game decisions. Let's say the person we saved later become a serial killer and killed countless people. Now we wonder if we should have saved this person in the first place. Maybe thinking with our artificial hearts instead of our heads was not the best way to play the game. Now in a post apocalyptic world our actions can be based on survival instead of what it really is ...obtaining good or bad karma points.

Survival in a great test of ones morals too. Fallout 3 comes close to forcing me to make some hard decisions, but not quite. If I had to kill an innocent person because I badly needed his ammo or money to repair my weapons, then we got something interesting. Unfortunately the game isn't hard on the player enough, and usually saving that innocent person just means he or she gives the player some really awesome reward. Take away the reward, the karma points, and make the enemies much more of a threat, and the players will have a much harder time making the "good" choice.

In Bioshock I harvested every last Little Sister. I figured I needed the extra power in order to survive in the horrible world of Rapture. I felt bad about my actions initially, but I figured it was a necessary evil. Bioshock is also a game based on an Ayn Rand novel, and I knew this going in, so I figured I was unquestionably making the right choice. Later I found out that saving the Little Sisters garnered special perks you could not obtain by playing the game "evil". Not only that, but I ended up with a bad ending. The struggle would have been exponentially more exciting if the lines of what was "good" and "evil" were blurred.

Shadow of the Colossus is another game that got close to doing something really interesting with moral struggle. I had to kill large majestic beasts in order to save the life of a mysterious girl the main protagonist obviously cared for. The beasts in question are victims and were usually just trying to defend themselves from their inevitable slaughter. I felt terrible each time I killed one of the colossi and questioned my motive constantly throughout. In the end I would kill the colossus and move on to the next. The game's attempt at real moral struggle fails because the player never has the option to do otherwise. Shadow of the Colossus does not progress unless you kill the Colossi. If I had the option of not killing them and instead letting this girl stay dead, then I might have honestly struggled with which decision to make. Unfortunately, unless I simply choose not to play the game, this option does not really exist.

So Fallout 3 is definitely close to what I want. Maybe I'm just really good at the game, but I wish it forced me into questionable moral decisions, like killing a vendor for his health items, more effectively then it currently does. If I'm trying to be a hero but I start kill good people to survive, and in turn it leads me down a path of killing people more and more with less consideration.... then holy shit, I might actually freak out a little about the decisions I was making. Fallout 3 comes close to situations like these, but just not quite close enough.

Take notes developers. If the struggle of "good and evil" is just a struggle between "more quests" and "fun", then keep these elements out of my damn games. Remove these fucking artificial "karma" systems, and start finding ways to make player truly struggle internally with hard choices. We don't need numbers, horns, or halos, telling us how we should act in a given situation. In the real world, we don't help people because we expect a reward. We help people because we are human, and because we know what is right. We know that doing "good" is simply enough.

Brad