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How do you approach games with moral choices?
I'm talking about games like the Fallouts, The Outer Worlds, some Telltale games, and many RPGs in which your decisions impact the outcomes of the NPCs and the world as a whole.
Do you make decisions based on what you think would be coherent with the character? Do you try to optimize your mechanical advantages? Are you consistent with your real world ethics, or do you like to pretend to be bad and put the world on fire? When available, do you focus on sex and/or romance? Or are you mostly concerned on what you think will make for a better story?
I'll generally pick the "Chaotic Good" path, to the degree that exists. Take care of people, defend them from the inevitable autocratic/authoritarian faction, build up society and infrastructure. The real world is stressful enough. I'm not interested in participating in a world where I tear things down recreationally.
Well, there's a few games I enjoy about tearing down the scenery, but they specifically eschew any moral statement about you tearing down buildings and whatnot and I'm happy to go along with that.
This is where I fall. Protect people, not structures (power or otherwise) unless said structures are what's protecting people.
I usually play the 'moral' options the first time through, unless I feel it severely hinders the experience somehow. I am just naturally drawn to doing so, even in virtual worlds. Then, in parallel or on second playthrough, I will have a separate save where I try other sets of moral choices- sometimes it adds plenty of fun to the game or a brand new experience.
On games with quick save / quick load, often I will try multiple choices (yep, I'm a save-scummer!) and then reload and continue with my preferred choice.
Yeah I lean the same way. First time I’m going with the “good” options, but I sometimes deviate I’d I feel the game’s moral compass is off. I’ll never cure the genophage in Mass Effect, for instance - not until Krogan culture become less violent. I’m somewhat utilitarian with these choices, prioritising the best outcome for all.
In The Witcher, I'm getting those cards. No moral question. In games where you can, I'm banging everything because why not? There's nothing wrong with non-consequential promiscuity. If there's a relationship system with defined boundaries and "bad" decisions, I'd likely play monogamous for the first run because I would only ever be in a monogamous relationship in real life.
In general I play as myself for my first run. It's a basic run that's typically a neutral good character: Follows the rules, breaks them for obvious exceptions, but still holds the character to a basic standard. I think it's more interesting to see how my gut instinct shapes the world for the first run.
After that run, when I have a better understanding of decisions and the scale of their consequences I'll actually RP a character. In Skyrim I'll kill the emperor and join the Imperial Legion because it's funny to think that they've got their leader's morally complicated assassin in their ranks. I'll shoot Father as soon as he rounds the corner in FO4 because he kidnapped my kid and resulted in the death of my spouse (that was a first-run fluke I ran with, it was hilarious). I plan on doing a "bad" run in Tyranny because it's the most morally good thing you can do from a universal stance (still working on the first run that's more a relative lawful good). In Stardew Valley I'll play as the hustling, monocropping, beach-farm-dwelling, Joja-backing perpetual bachelor with a cat who looks like Jeff Bezos with a trash can lid on his head because it flies in the face of what your character fled.
I guess if I were to summarize it it would be that I'm curious about what I would do in the world first, then what is most interesting for a repeat run. I specifically try not to optimize my decisions because, IMO, that's not the point. Life is unoptimized. On a repeat run I'll pick the interesting choices to see where things go.
I strive to find the perfect scenario- as impossible as that may seem. I seek out every sidequest and interaction that can better the result and work with that. I pick what I genuinely think will result in the best possible ending... Though I also tend to look up how things will end if I don't feel confident (and god forbid it's one of those fakeout "you were right all along!" choices where there is no wrong answer, you're always doing the right thing, you wonderful special child, because I HATE those, and same goes for "you were wrong all along!"). Basically, I'm a sappy bastard who wants to make the world a better place, and in video games, I can actually do that, with noticeable and immediate results. So I do it. Aggressively. I will go so far out of my way to make everyone's day better in a game.
The exception to this is when the game sufficiently dehumanizes things. Like, if they're putting in a token effort at making the characters into characters, I'll still try to be the good guy. If the characters cease to feel like there's been any effort making them at all sane, realistic, believable, or diverse at all, where they're just these creepy, inhuman shells that I begin to detest for their hollow repetition of annoying stock lines over the course of the game, with a world that's dismal and more interested in killing itself than having any solution, and a story where there are no right answers because everything is fucked... Yeah, that usually disconnects me from it so hard I give up on the good guy thing. Like Fallout 4. Fuck that game. I tried to find a good ending and literally none of them gave me a satisfying conclusion. Go back and check that game, beginning to end, then tell me this: Are synths sapient in their own right, is it a glitch in the system, or is it something else? Who is in the right: The Railroad, the Institute, or someone else? There is no answer. They didn't want to answer the question, they just wanted to go "oooooh, look, moral ambiguity~!" without putting in the effort to give a genuine moral quandary.
... And even then I can never bring myself to be a complete bastard.
I mean, some of the synths say they're sapient. If other people disagree and want to hunt the synths down for wanting self-determination, who do you want to side with? That didn't seem like much of a moral quandary to me.
Though by the end of FO4 you've probably killed hundreds of sapient creatures, so whether there's metal or meat hands holding the gun is probably less relevant than whether it's aimed at you. Any moral choices forced by the narrative are somewhat weaker when made by someone who's killed more than the total number of people remaining in the Commonwealth by the end of the story.
Most games with moral choice systems handle it very poorly in a variety of different ways. In some cases it's like:
"The orphanage needs money do you want to? Give them literally everything you have [+2 good]. Do nothing [neutral]. Burn the building down for no fucking reason [+50 evil]".
Other times they'll be like "Yeah sure you indiscriminately murdered thousands of troops on the way here, but now Mecha-Stalin says he's super-duper-sowwy-UwU, just like he said the last 3 times this happened before immediately going back to mass-murder. Kill [+50 evil] or Spare [+50 good]"
And finally there's the Mass Effect version where it's like "Be nice [+50 good, 2 million credits and a unique skin for your motorcycle] Be mean [+50 evil, everyone hates you and someone puts a kick me sign on your back]"
I'm sure there are other sort of archetypical bad moral choices that you see over and over, but most systems I've seen have the sort of incredibly watered down ethics you need to get approval by your boss's boss's boss who thinks "why can't we all just get along" is the pinnacle of ethical thought.
At the moment I can't think of any video games where I've been impressed by the ethical choices they've laid out. Table Top RPGs on the other hand offer the opportunity for much more complex choices and discussions about the nature of ethics, since the outcomes of your choices are adjudicated by the DM who 1)you are able to talk with and 2)isn't beholden to a committee of people who can't risk upsetting shareholders
Edit:
Don't forget other classics such as
"Ah ha, but what if everyone was bad all along"
"This villain has some convoluted motivation behind their cartoonishly evil acts, so it's complicated actually"
"If robots can feel pain and beg not to be murdered, is it still okay to murder them? They're not human, you see"
I fully agree with this. The good choice is usually harder and more interesting, the bad choice is usually just fighting. It's obvious in the majority of games with choices that the "good" choice is what the developers want you to pick and put the most effort into.
"Would you help this poor inconsequential village, even though your main quest to save the universe is extremely time-sensitive?"
As someone who wants to play what the game offers, is there really a choice?
The "what if everyone was bad all along" moment halfway through Bioshock Infinite is where the game really lost me.
Agh!!! I know I JUST watched a video talking about this exact point the other day and I cannot for the life of me remember what it was. Commenting so I (hopefully) remember to come back when I have a source
Oh neat, I'll keep an eye out for that!
The more I think about it the more confident I am that it was most likely a subsection of one of hbombs fallout videos. If you’ve seen those you probably will have seen what im thinking of. If not I’ll like to the time code in his video when I find it
That does sound like an interesting video.
Oh its a great video. So here is his Fallout 3 is Garbage video. This was later followed up by his video Fallout: New Vegas is Genius. I would suggest watching the whole thing so you have full context for his arguments, but if you understandably don't have the time or desire, you can start at 54:05 which is Part 5 and the section on morality in games. It lasts about 20m and I hear echos of the video in @PapaNacho's comment.
Thanks for linking to those. I definitely agree with a lot of what he had to say. I was originally speaking more broadly, but comparing FO3 and F:NV is a great way to provide practical examples of good and bad moral choices in games
That is really a great video. It's pretty big, and the guy is clearly a very competent and dedicated player. I am not. So a lot of his criticisms are beyond anything that I really notice myself. I even played the original, 2D Fallout games, but the only thing I remember about them is "cool, another monster to click on!"
One thing I do disagree with, but only partially, is the focus on discoverability and how quest markers make you disengage with the world. While I understand the logic of the criticism, I'm the kind of dumb and inattentive player that will miss even the most absurdly obvious "hints", and without the hand-holding I will spend 4 hours frantically running around getting more and more lost and frustrated until I decide that this game is not for me. Maybe I am part of the problem, but too much cleverness and subtlety will inevitably make me put the controller down.
This may be slightly controversial, but I miss the time when not everything had to be voice acted. I actually enjoy reading text, I can do it at my own pace. If a dialogue has little to no narrative relevance, let me just scan it for information without having to skip the voiced lines. If the character or scene does have a deeper significance to the plot, by all means, give it to a voice actor. This contrast can be effectively used for dramatic effect. It also tells me which interactions require my full attention. Games nowadays have so many lines of voiced dialogue that they became dull and a chore.
One way to solve that would be to give me the option to say "only show me voiced dialogue for important interactions", or something like that.
For most games I play as me and I do what I would likely do. And that is generally the morally good choices.
But The Outer Worlds finally got me to break out of that. It’s made me want to play as something more neutral. Maybe chaotic is a better term. My character is on the surface generally for the good things; he wants people to thrive. But he is also a manipulative liar who mainly just wants you to like him. And if you are rich he will probably steal from you if he thinks he won’t get caught. Either way he will stick himself in your business.
Please ask before you base your characters off me :P
Games that come to mind for me are Fable and KOTOR.
I did feel like it was harder for me to be more evil in KOTOR because the writing was pretty dark in how your character would treat people. BUT the dark side powers were usually much more action based and violent compared to the Jedi powers which were mostly defensive in nature, so I enjoyed the dark side path in the end for that reason.
Fable did not have the same emotional weight to being evil. It was pretty easy to be the good guy and play out the story. The evil side just seemed kind of hyperbolic, too evil. The character even grows horns the later you get into the evil stage. BUT the same thing is involved in this game. The evil powers were generally just cooler and more exciting than the good powers.
This is pretty common, having the "bad" choice be disproportionately bad. The worst is when it's obscured by a summary option/label before picking it.
You see a child on the street. You:
a) Compliment -> "Hey kid, nice shirt"
b) Bully -> murder the child
Unless it is a really good game this comes down the what choice is under the default action button. Boring I know.
If it is a really good game the choice usually ends up being the one I'm mostly curious about, ie. what I think will give be the most interesting story.
I play as me and according to my own morality as much as possible, and I take that very seriously. I don't really roleplay so much as I transport myself into new situations and see how my beliefs hold up there.
This mostly means I'm a goody two-shoes but I'll take any opportunity to topple unjust power structures and regularly get into trouble with police and guards and such.
First playthrough I generally try to do the basic hero options, although I do feel like I'm playing a character more than just making personal choices. I will sometimes look up if there's any interesting loot or if one option is just mechanically better or more interesting than the other if I'm not feeling that immersed, and just reload if it makes me feel too bad, haha.
Occasionally an open world immersion style game really gets its hooks into me and I'll do multiple playthroughs of roleplaying different characters. FNV as a low intellect gay cannibal was an absolute blast. I've done Skyrim as a rat bastard lizard vampire, an anxious mage who focused on calming spells, a nationalist Nord, and a paladin imperial. Not all the way through, but just enough to be satisfying.
I do kind of play soap opera sometimes too. With games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, I sometimes have a little story in mind for my character that I play through, often I know broadly what the choices are but I like to see the details play out. My favourite 'canon' playthroughs of ME1 and DA1 intentionally make choices for The Drama.
Spoilers for ME1 and DA1, even though they're so so old
My Shepard romanced Kaiden, but when the time came, made the choice that lead to his death. Leads to some good roleplaying in 2. And for DA1, my fave is to end it in self sacrifice after romancing Leliana.