Variety Friday: Every Game Has Wrong Choices

Essentially any game needs to have “wrong” choices.  But there are many kinds of wrong actions which can be interpreted in different ways.  First let’s take a game that’s an obvious example, say, Modern Warfare 2.  The game has a simple wrong, which is dying.  You don’t want to die, you do want to kill, simple Wrong Action vs Right Action.  Though each game also has more in-depth choices but it all revolves around the main choices of right or wrong.

Now, when I say right or wrong I am not referring to the moral choices involved with right or wrong, just simply the choices which are what you are trying to do, vs what you aren’t, as in my Call of Duty example of death and living.  The reason I bring this up at all, is to simply show how game design either directly or indirectly focuses around wrong actions.

Let’s move on to a different genre with different examples, World of Warcraft.   WoW does have the basic “Dying Bad, Living Good” form of wrong choices, but that’s not all.  Another form of wrong choices can be found within the deep equipment customization.  It is always better to have better gear, and wearing beginner gear at level 23 would be considered “wrong”.  But another thing this brings up is how wrong choices can be interpreted in different ways.  Because a tank would want more health points, while a mage may want more mana, so the right choice depends on the situation.  Not only that, but wrong choices don’t have to be accepted as wrong by the player, because if a player wants to look cool and have lower stats, more power to them.

When discussing this with someone else, they brought up the example of Sim City, and how not having a Fire Department could be considered wrong, but they were working towards burning the whole city down.  This is where the player can choose what’s right or wrong.  In games such as Sim City and The Sims, the player can choose what would be considered a wrong action.  So as far as game design goes, the developer wouldn’t focus around a set amount of wrong actions, but instead, would focus around actually creating many wrong actions and letting the player choose which ones to follow or not.

My final example is going to be Dragon Age Origins.  As with most fighting games it had the main wrong actions of having a member of your party die.  But there was also the story, even the story revolved around these basic right and wrong actions, but how they were portrayed, was either that the developer was very vague about the choice so the player wouldn’t actually know what was right or wrong at the time, or that all actions were wrong, just various degrees of such.  So ultimately all games have wrong actions in one way or another, and whether you realize it or not, it is the basis of game design.

Variety Friday: Moral Choices Need Repercussions

After over 5 weeks of variety-less Fridays, I’m Back!  This week I am going to focus on something mentioned in my Deus Ex review, which was how the moral choice of killing or disabling people didn’t have any repercussions, so I’m just going to broaden that into how moral choices in games need to have repercussions, or they are meaningless.

Now, first we must define what actually constitutes as a “Moral Choice”.  I would describe it as a choice which plays upon the morals of a person, usually without clear outcomes so they are solely up to the player.  You can find a lot of these within the Mass Effect series as well as Dragon Age: Origins.  Those games base their story on moral choices, right and wrong, and etc.  One thing Dragon Age did well was that many choices didn’t have obvious answers, and only at the end of the game did you get to see a glimpse of what came from them.

Now, on to one of my main examples, Deus Ex; the original game based moral choices on a simple two answer choice which was present throughout the entire game, and that was the choice between lethally killing people, or non-lethally taking them down.  Now at the beginning you were simply told “You shouldn’t kill them” and then you got to choose to take the advice, or ignore it.  But, later on certain people with certain values either liked that you didn’t kill them and gave you bonuses, while if you did kill a lot of enemies other people would believe you did what was right, while others would give you shit about what being a citizen really means.  For me it was that talk with the general-looking guy who mans the armory, he simply said that he remembered when being a good citizen came first, and that reminded me that people are people (even if they are made of polygons without fingers) and then I decided to play a bit more on the nice side.

But, this isn’t about my experiences, what’s important is how the moral choice was present throughout the whole game, and while it was essentially a choice of the player, the game rewarded you for taking certain actions, whether good or bad, which is a great way to make choices meaningful and still up to the player.  Now as I briefly mentioned in the Deus Ex: Human Revolution review, there were almost no repercussions to killing or disabling people.  Depending on the player this could still be a moral choice for them, but for others (such as myself) I found myself thinking “Why not just kill everyone?  It’s not like anything bad will happen and it’s much easier” and nothing bad did happen, not even one fuck was given, I even killed half of the Detroit PD and a minute later all was forgotten and no one cared, there wasn’t even any faction like/dislike type of stuff going on.

Now when no repercussions are added to moral choices, two main things occur; one is that the sense of realism and immersion into the world is hindered, because you know people should have an opinion and act upon some of your actions (for better or worse).  And two being that there is a big gap in the story.  For the players, killing an important person in the plot or sparing his life should have a big effect in the game, though in Human Revolution, there were two occurrences in which I didn’t hear a thing from either saved character through the whole rest of game.  For the player they don’t get to see if they did something good or bad, while also not being able to simply see a possible back story.  On the developer side, they missed great opportunities to give the player advantages and disadvantages for being merciful or not.  Now these points don’t just apply to Deus Ex but for all games, since a lot of story based games have moral choices.

A very different example is Catherine.  The moral choices are essentially in the form of what is the player’s opinion on cheating and marriage.  While many games directly relate to your choices, Catherine instead showed your overall choice play-out in the dialog, without actually giving the player an idea of what could come upon his choices, so the player knows something is happening, but doesn’t know what until later in the game.  If Catherine didn’t have moral choices, almost all of the story would be gone and it would simply be another game such as Super Meat Boy.  Games need moral choices to not only have players question themselves, but to provide deeper story.

Now back to Deus Ex, I brought up a problem now it is only fitting that I propose a possible solution.  One of the main characters, David Sarif (Adam Jenson’s boss, Adam being who the player plays as) is represented as an evil person through advertising, but is actually a very rational person with some very different beliefs, if they could have built upon those beliefs and leaned Sarif to one side or another (supporting lethality or non-lethality) it could have not only altered the story in that you could keep Sarif happy or do your own thing, he would be second guessing you since you talk to him a lot anyway.  If you did something he specifically didn’t like, he should give you shit about it, revoke a bonus or something, while also losing some trust in you.  Simply giving just one of the characters an opinion in morality could have drastically changed the game.  This is true for many games as well, sure you could keep characters neutral, or you could experiment with alignments and developers would probably find this brings a more satisfying experience.