What about the overwhelming majority of games which force you to be good, and then punish you? If evil should never be rewarded, nothing bad should ever happen to you if you’re “good”, either.

If the point of a game is for you to play an evil character then, yeah, you’ll be rewarded for doing evil things. If you don’t want to play that game…don’t play that game. But don’t whine about it afterwards.

Similarly, if the point of a game is for you to play a good character…well, the game still needs conflict, after all. Bob’s Average Day is not a fun game. Something bad has to happen to Bob, even if he’s a paragon of virtue.

Expecting games to sacrifice uniqueness, and all melt into the same mold of “Every moral issue is multi-path”, is a step on the road to madness. Save it for the tabletop, where some storyteller can improvise on the fly - pre-programmed games have to railroad you somehow, and if they all railroad you the same way, you only ever need to play one video game, and then you’re done with the entire medium.

I’m not sure about the game actually rewarding one behavior over the other, it has been awhile since I played. I do remember usually trying to play through as benevolently as possible, but had a pretty hard time keeping my hand from getting some evil spots on it and so it seemed harder to be good at the time.

I do think it was a more interesting game because of the way morality was incorporated. And while I agree that the morality component of Gal Civ II is a minor part of the game, the mutliple routes to winning also reward more diverse moral viewpoints of players. It’s not just a military strategy game where you violently conquer your enemies even though it can be played that way. In all, I think having more morality components in games makes for more complex, interesting games.

One of the main objections I have to many games is the way women are represented. It’s not just the impracticality of Lara Croft tombraiding in hot pants and a wonderbra. There are alot of games out there that just have no female components at all. The military strategy genre is the prime example. It’s not about rewriting history, as some people suggest in defense of these games. I understand it would be completely unreasonble to have female soldier on the front lines in a WWII game. But, it isn’t as if women were not affected by or involved in war efforts. They might not have been driving tanks, but they were involved in resistance efforts, they were involved in espionage, they were involved in caring for the sick and the dying. It would not be historically innacurate for a game to have some of these kinds of roles represented. Instead, we have games like Rome: Total War in which pretty much all women can do is get married off and beget heirs. While I think in general the idea of a game set in ancient Rome is pretty cool, for me as a female I can’t play a game where the only characters I could identify with have such a limited role. And certainly, I’m sure there are some people who are perfectly satisfied with these kind of games as they are and I’m in no way saying they aren’t good games. I just don’t think there is any way you can argue that adding in more complexity necessarily will make for a bad game.

There’s a saying: “Nothing in a movie happens by accident.” I think that this is largely true of gaming, as well. When a developer makes a choice like rewarding the player for murdering a child, that’s something that’s intentional. As gamers, I think it’s important for us to consider the implications, and to think about what those choices mean. Just because an action is morally questionable doesn’t mean that the game is bad for allowing or encouraging it, and I never said it was. Again, in SotC, the main character is acting in morally questionable ways, but I think it’s one of the most brilliant games I’ve ever played. The choice to make some of the Colossi sympathetic, and to make the main character morally culpable was important, and it paid off in spades. The developers intentionally force the player to engage in acts that, upon inspection, raise moral questions. From what I can see, that was part of the point of the experience. That’s one of the things that makes it such a brilliant game.

So, no, I don’t think it’s unfair to question why the makers of Bioshock made the choice to include the ability to kill children for reward. I think it was an intentional choice, and, from the interviews I’ve read, it’s precisely because they wanted to make the player experience moral concerns. If they weren’t interested in raising questions of morality, they wouldn’t have you murdering children- it could easily have been small animals, or robots, or any number of other things.
It isn’t, though.
They’re children.

It could pay off brilliantly for them.
If it’s a good game, I hope it does.

You want developers of electronic entertainment to not only wildly estimate your own personal moral compass, but program in multiple game/reward paths to accommodate it.

No, I don’t. I don’t think that it takes any “wild estimation” to realize that murdering children is something that most people will find morally questionable. Note, again, that I haven’t condemned the game- I’m just not going to pretend that the creators are morons who don’t realize that killing children is kind of… uh… taboo.

Look, there is certainly a lot of debate about what constitutes moral behavior, but there are some aspects that are relatively cut and dry. Even if you believe in subjective morality, murder, theft, lying, rape… those things tend to make it on most of the “bad” lists I’ve seen. Given the number of games that actually do reward or punish players for making “bad” choices, I don’t think that it’s unreasonable at all. If I shoot an ally in a FPS, my ally will eventually shoot me back. Thus, I’ve been sanctioned for negative behavior. Games reward and punish player behavior all the time, so my comment isn’t ridiculous at all. You don’t have to create multiple paths to reward or punish players for the choices they make. Sometimes you reward players by giving them better items. Sometimes you punish them by taking things away from them, by adding more enemies, etc.

Or, you might reward them by giving them perks at the end of the game. Silent Hill rewarded players by giving them different endings and access to new items, based on how they solved certain puzzles.

Comparing a game like Fallout, which is dependent on your interactions with other, life-like human entities, to one in which you are thrust into an entirely abnormal situation is nonsense.

Neither of us have played Bioshock, but I really have to question this statement- have you watched the trailer? The child reacts like a life-like human entity when the character tries to drag it out of the ductwork. There is rather clearly fear on the child’s face. Again, it seems to me that making them children was a pretty significant choice. Further, I question how you can call the world of Fallout- where there are mutants, giant rats, plasma rifles, etc, anything but “an entirely abnormal situation.” It sure looks like Bioshock was trying for a greater sense of realism than Fallout, from what I’ve seen.

If you want a game which rewards you for following your personal, arbitrary set of morals, make one yourself, or find a developer who has made one which closely fits.

If all you took from my article was that I want developers to follow my personal “arbitrary” set of morals, then you’ve seriously misread my intent. The fact that I appreciate games that treat complex moral issues as complex moral issues doesn’t mean that I only like games that reinforce my moral values. Do I object to games that force the player to do immoral things and then reward the player for it?
Sure.

Please try to think a little more on things, beneath their appearance of “amorality” in this case, before posting again, otherwise you may mislead readers who do not give such things a second thought.

Please don’t come onto my website and tell me how to post. I’m more than happy to entertain criticism. You’re free to disagree with the content of my post if you want. This is, however, my site, not yours. When I post things on here, I’m going to work on the assumption that I don’t need to preface my comments with “These are my opinions,” because I assume that my readers are pretty smart people. I don’t need to make a disclaimer before I post shit.

And definitely don’t come on my site and tell me that I haven’t thought about things. I think it’s pretty obvious that I’ve given the subject quite a bit of thought, actually.

Speaking of thought:
1. Why did you put quotes around “amorality”? I never, once, said anything about games being amoral. Were they intended as scare quotes?
2. The word you probably wanted was “immoral.” There’s pretty big difference between the two. If you’re going to try to shame me for not thinking enough, the least you could do is make sure you’re using the right word, and that you’re criticizing the position I actually hold.

The only line I found so ridiculous that I will seriously address it was near the end, specifically when you said “If they took the hard route the whole way through the game, because they wanted to do The Right Thing, they deserve some kind of reward.” Please, consider what you are asking!

You want developers of electronic entertainment to not only wildly estimate your own personal moral compass, but program in multiple game/reward paths to accommodate it. Putting aside the technical hurdles of such a request, there is the much more obvious route to take of the often-iterated cry to simply play a different game. I resisted putting that last statement in capitals, but it needs to be emphasized.

To wit, I personally do not find Bioshock to be morally objectionable in the least. In the context of the game, the children do not represent the same social/biological construct that an actual child does, and most persons can make that distinction. In fact, I praise Bioshock (lightly, because it has yet to be actually released of course and we have no real idea how it will play) for the very qualities you list early in the article - innovation in control, a storyline powered by Ayn Rand and dystopia, etcetera.

If you find the killing of child-like or child objects to be distasteful, play a different game. If you want a game which rewards you for following your personal, arbitrary set of morals, make one yourself, or find a developer who has made one which closely fits. Comparing a game like Fallout, which is dependent on your interactions with other, life-like human entities, to one in which you are thrust into an entirely abnormal situation is nonsense.

On one point, I do agree, and that pertains to SotC; specifically, the sympathy you felt towards the colossi. However, you have to take into account the fact that in a video game, or watching a movie or reading a novel or playing a board game, you are not the main character. They are placed in an entirely different framework than you, environmentally, morally, motivationally - taking SotC as an example, the main character was a person who was more dedicated to resurrecting his companion than anything else, and so one can imagine that he felt empathy for the Colossi, or perhaps questioned the morality of his actions, but in his mind he had rationalized his actions, committed, and only at that point, with this entire persona outside of your own, is the controller placed in your hands. I do not know of a game which allows the entire player’s persona to influence its course - such a game would be too much like the player’s own reality, and may place them in a metaphysical crisis if they think about it too hard.

Please try to think a little more on things, beneath their appearance of “amorality” in this case, before posting again, otherwise you may mislead readers who do not give such things a second thought.

I remember a short explanation of freudian psychology, and of the id, ego and super-ego. The id was the part that wants all its desires satisfied, and wants them satisfied now (ie. gorge yourself on food, have sex with anything that stays still long enough then sleep for 24 hours straight). The ego holds that in check with the thought of all the bad things that would happen if the id was given free reign - you’d get fat, get arrested and piss off everyone around you.

The super-ego was slightly more complex and apparently Freud thought this part of the subconscious didnt develop in everyone, its role in the mix was that it wanted to do/not do things because they were right/wrong things to do, not just in order to fill a desire or avoid a bad consequence.

Sounds like the people you described (only held in restraint by the consequences) don’t have a very strong super-ego,

Either that, or they choose not to exercise it when in a game - because let’s face it, if you can tell reality from animation then you know there’s a difference between beating up a hooker and pressing buttons which correspond to in-game actions that produce an animated picture of a character beating up a hooker (both of whom are composed entirely of pixels/polygons)

I started to reply to the comments, but there’s so much to say! I’m going to have to do another entry, I think.

Anyway, great, great comments, and thanks for the feedback.

I’ll play GTA3, and recognize it’s a game. Yes, there are distateful things in the game, and I don’t necessarily enjoy doing them, but I do enjoy the gameplay. On the flipside, I know people who think the most enjoyable part of the game isn’t the gameplay, but the fact that you can do those things that I (and you, apparently) would find distasteful. They enjoy the part of the game that I find distateful.

And that’s what really bothers me. Not that a videogame rewards bad conduct, but that there are people out there who seek do to bad things, and are held in restraint not by a personal moral code, but by the consequenses (fines, prison, etc) of doing bad things. How did they get to that point? What can be done about it? What should be done about it?

Telas

Galciv II (and the original game) has an interesting morality system, though it seems like it’s a bit of a tangential aspect of the game. You get various situations that you can respond to in a bad way (and get a bonus) a neutral way (and get nothing) or a good way (and generally get penalized). This helps you or hurts you in that other races will treat you differently based on your ethical alignment. If you’re evil, the other evil races will like you, while the good races won’t (and vice versa). Personally, I usually end up neutral, but at least they try…

GTA III was just fun because of the freedom and interactivity of the world. It wasn’t so much that doing the bad things was fun as it was that the game actually allowed you to do so. I couldn’t think of any games that were so free before, so I liked it. But you’re right, I haven’t played that in years. Part of that, though, is that the game hasn’t changed much either. The latest game’s innovations basically force you to watch your diet and exercise, for crying out loud.

When I first started playing WoW, I felt guilty when killing monsters and beasts that were non-combative. Even more guity when a deer or bunny would be killed for skinning. I mean, the bunnies scream when you kill them, who can’t feel bad about that? I would even prefer to kill ‘diseased’ deer over the healthy kind, as it felt more humane.

Now? The really sad thing? I’m kind of over the guilt.

It turned out that the key was in the possession of a madman who was running around the area, a noncombatant that I had assumed it was my job, in part, to protect from all the monsters. But in fact, the game designers were expecting me to *kill* this guy for no reason other than that in Blood, you can kill innocent bystanders with impunity and for “comedic” effect.

That really, really ticked me off.

So no, you aren’t the only one who thinks about this sort of thing in games. ^^