Rant: Nobody Cares About Moral Shades Of Gray?
Recently in a live chat on Playstation.Blog, Sucker Punch director Nate Fox made an interesting comment about the morality system in his upcoming PS3 game Infamous. When asked if there was a neutral morality option in the game, Fox replied:
No, not really. We had one initially but we found that people wanted to be really good or really evil. No one cared about the middle.
Really? I find it hard to believe that nobody cared about moral middle ground, possibly because I am one of those people that cares a great deal about the moral middle ground in a game. I know I am not alone, because one of the most vocal criticisms I have heard about the game Bioshock is that there was no morally neutral ending.
And Bioshock isn't the only game that has received criticism for ignoring the gray shades of morality. I've heard plenty of criticism for Spiderman: Web of Shadows, Fable 2, and both Knights of the Old Republic games for their cut and dry morality systems. So there is clearly an audience for that middle ground if people complain about its absence.
When I play a game with a morality system and choices, nothing irritates me more than being aware of which is the "good" choice and which is the "bad" one. It takes away from the immersion of the game if you have to stop and think at each choice if you want to be good or evil. That's part of what I loved about games like Fallout 3 and Mass Effect, where the morality isn't always so clear. They allowed me to make decisions based on how I actually felt about a situation.
That's what a morality system should be, something that makes you think about how you would react. There are definitely options and decisions that can fall between the categories of Jesus and Hitler. Did anyone else try to warn the sheriff of Megaton about Mr. Burke? It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, didn't it? That's the kind of morality I'm talking about. It seemed good at the time, and as the player I was able to justify my actions, but good intentions don't always breed good actions. I like it when a game can acknowledge that.
I'm not trying to pass judgement on Infamous because of how it uses its morality system. Bioshock is one of my favorite games, and I'll freely admit that it did a terrible job with only providing the most black and white moral options. But there is so much more that developers could do with morality in videogames. By challenging the player to actually think through a situation rather than just say "this is good and this is bad" it makes the choice that much more compelling, and allows the player to feel like he or she is actually making an impact on the virtual world.
And there is definitely an audience for morally ambiguous material, as evidenced by the huge number of posts on various forums by people complaining about the lack of moral middle ground in a number of games. I'm sorry, but to say that "no one cared about the middle" just seems like a cop out to me. I'm a writer too, I get that moral ambiguity can be hard to put in a story, but don't say that people don't want it. Because I know I do, and I have a sneaking suspicion that I am not alone.
NaviFairy
Posted to Hot Stuff, Miscellany, Video Games on 21 May 2009
· Comments (17)
Other stuff like this: Infamous, morality, Rant, Sucker Punch
I agree with you a great deal about a lot of this, I too would love to see a game with a less cut-and-dry morality system. At the same time though I think you aren't stating things properly. It's not that they cut out the depth, it's that they cut out the NEUTRAL options. Those aren't the same thing, neutral morality in these kinds of games often revolve more around not being good or evil, around making the most practical choice and such.
And in that light... yes, I think he's right, most people don't care about neutrality options for the most part, though I still think it's important to have a middle road just for those who decide their character isn't quite altruistic enough for this choice or that choice, or not quite that evil. Personally, I think it makes the rest of the morality a little more boring when you have no choice BUT to be Jesus or the Devil.
Note that Nate Fox said no one "cared" rather than no one "cares." To me, this sounds like they did focus testing or something similar, and it may really have shown them that no one did care.
I wonder what kind of testing they did. Part of me suspects that they just monitored what choices people made and noted that most gravitated towards good or evil with few, if any, walking the middle road.
The best way to get morality choices to be effective in a game is to NOT reward the player with specific perks or powers for the choices made. With that aspect, morality becomes an aspect of min/maxing your character to your preferences, not making thoughtful choices.
Simply give the player a flat reward for making the choice, whichever way s/he goes, which would mean that the focus is shifted to the way in which the story unfolds. If they get the same reward either way, then they have no incentive beyond their own personal choices to choose good or evil.
The fact of the matter is, no matter how cool morally gray characters are, it's HARD to make a character arc about someone who's neutral, or even slightly amoral. It's boring to watch someone be just a little good, or just a little bad.
Allow me to use a Star Wars reference. Boba Fett. Boba Fett is awesome because you see him, like, twice. He's a hardass bounty hunter who plays by his own rules, and that's fine. But the way he was portrayed in the original trilogy, there's no growth or character development.
Counterpoint with Han Solo. At the start, he's kind of a scumbag, but really just doesn't want to get involved. And then, over time, he changes and grows as a character, leading him towards an extreme end of the morality spectrum, in this case, a hero.
Great fiction works best with dynamic characters, and dynamic characters don't walk the middle ground or compromise. They're archetypes. They're grand symbols of the best and worst of us, and that's why the morality systems in games work the way they do.
On a personal note, I've tried this vaunted "middle road" in many different games, both video and pen and paper, and I find myself BORED to TEARS by either not being able to take a stand on anything, or carefully balancing my actions, good and evil, so that there's no net gain. I say, play these games the way YOU would react, or the way you think the CHARACTER would react. If you think Cole would electrocute an orphanage full of babies, go ahead. If you think he would rescue kittens from trees, go ahead. That's why they offer the moral choices in the first place. The bonus powers and such for doing them are just add-ons. Everything I've seen from them says "The extra good power helps you be extra good" and "the extra bad power helps you be extra bad." You still get access to all the powers available in the game, the alignment-tinged ones just give the character more of a good/evil flair.
As far as the story goes, look. He's a superhero or supervillain. That's the story they want to tell. Not interested in learning that story? That's unfortunate for you, because those of us that are will be busily frying anything that moves and/or helping little old ladies cross the street, and having a damn good time doing both.
Also, on a side note, I'd be very surprised if, with the stuff I've seen and heard, there weren't hard, dilemma-style choices to be made in the game where something is lost in the wash. And not just Bioshock's "If you cure the Little Sisters, you don't get their Adam," because let's face it, that didn't work.
I really suspect this is because it's so much harder to write a compelling neutral path.
With Good or Evil you can stick with big stupid cliches, which is what even the 'best' written games like Knights of the Old Republic do. When you apply the same ham-fisted techniques to an ambiguous path and ask your testers how they feel about it of course they're going to say 'meh'.
Meh. The neutral path is what I live in my daily life. When I go into fictional worlds I like to be a hero or a villain.
I can see where you're coming from wanting to option though.
Also, pretty annoying that in a game about choices, you're saddled with an annoying girlfriend. Did they really see games like Kotor, Fable, etc. and think: "What those games need is a scripted girlfriend."?
Of course that might just be me being spoiled with the option of having same-sex relationships.
@EshuElehbara
I'm not saying that games shouldn't allow you to be totally good or totally bad. I'm sure there are people who want to play as both of those too, and they should be free to do so. But Adding the option to play as a character in the gray area between those two extremes would not take away from the experience of either playing as good or bad. A middle ground charcter could get some of the benefits from either side, depending on play style.
Let's say you want to play as Cole and be very tough on crime. Well, killing criminals gets you negative karma, and will lead you toward being an evil character. But then couldn't that same character be a humanitarian for the people that aren't committing crimes? The game could give you bonuses to abilities like healing civilians and an area attack that stuns instead of kills in case civilians are in range. But then you also could get a very targeted attack for killing since you also have that darker side of being very harsh on crime. That would be a middle ground character, with abilities benefiting from both being good and bad while still striking a balance.
But in a more general context, I can see why you would say that playing a middle ground character would be boring given how you describe it. If I were playing constantly monitoring my actions and decisions to deliberately try to be middle ground, I would hate it too. But that's not what I meant. Why not just play the game how you would act in the situation? For me, I wouldn't always act in a good way, nor would I always act in a bad way. My overall morality may skew slightly to one side or the other, but it wouldn't be at a complete extreme on either side. That's where I have a problem with these types of games. Why should the options be so cut and dry as killing babies or saving kittens? Maybe there's a Robin Hood type character that is stealing a lot of stuff, but then giving it away to others? What do you do then? Do you stop him and have him arrested? If you do, do you continue to help the people he was helping, or do you abandon them? Or if you don't stop him, do you help him continue, or even make him your sidekick? That's a fairly rudimentary example, but even that has layers of choices that go beyond simply being good or bad and make you question the motives behind each decision.
It's not about being neutral or amoral. In Fallout 3, characters could be in a tough scenario and have to resort to stealing or murder for the sheer sake of their own survival. This didn't make them necessarily bad people, but clearly they weren't altruistic Jesus types because they resorted to such measures. It's about people who have different views on different scenario's. Maybe you are wholly against murder, but stealing is five-by-five. Where would you put that character? Logically, somewhere in the middle.
@EshuElehbara -"Great fiction works best with dynamic characters, and dynamic characters don't walk the middle ground or compromise. They're archetypes" WOW.... i am interested as to what you consider great fiction. ... that is completely and utterly untrue... when you are a kid maybe that seems the case but as an adult all great works are morally ambigous just like most choices in realy life and that is what makes you relate.
Oh and that's not the story they want to tell... it's the story the target market (you and most likely others your age) want to hear as it makes it easy and you can be all happy by not being challenged in any form... hello that is what art does best.
@ Xian
I agree with you. I think the major flaws in the morality system of games like this one, Black & White, the Fables, &c. is that they are functionally built around this dichotomy of Good/Evil. They specifically reward characters differently for blatant moral decisions, and this was the drive for gamers to continue for a particular type of gameplay--not as a contribution to much of the game story.
Games with more nuanced approaches to moral judgments, such as Bioshock, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 3, Myst, and Mass Effect, do so with what many GG commenters have pointed to: placing them in the story itself.
@ Navifairy
Word. Though I think Bioschock, while providing only polarized options for its decisions, still worked it rather well into the overall story in that it was incredibly well done for what it was.
@EshuElehbara
Personally, I think games that attempt to approximate a person caught in extraordinary circumstances benefit most from having more nuanced character development. Different types of games appeal to different audiences, of course.
Agree with Xian and blacksheepboy: In-your-face moral options really don't work to build up a neutral character. Subtle changes in gameplay or even just leaving the player to judge his actions himself is way more powerful. Great examples of this are Morrowind and the Gothic series. In both I prefer to play a more or less righteous character who doesen't have much of a connection to "evil" factions like rebels or thieves' guilds. Yet I still become an incredibly good thief and occasional murderer to further my gains. If you don't get caught doing it, the only one judging your behaviour is yourself, which makes it really all the more meaningful.
@darkopiate
Given how outraged you get at EshuElehbara, your own comments aren't much better. So any character that is in a moral extreme is completely below you and could only appeal to children? Rather condescending.
@blacksheepboy
Similairly, it's a rather sweeping statement to say that everybody who plays as a moral extreme only does so because of the rewards. As if these characters couldn't possibly be part of a compelling story.
@NaviFairy
I think you just solved the problem, from a technical standpoint. In all these Molyneux-esque games, there's just one big slider all your karmic actions get dumped on. By breaking it up into separate areas that don't affect each other, like behavior toward criminals versus civilians, you could average out multiple sets of statistics and end up with a character that's neutral on the whole. It would also make it much more fun to role play if the game actually acknowledged that there was some finer pattern to your decisions than broad, sweeping tendencies toward devil or angel.
Fallout 3 is the first game I've played with an actual neutral path, or at least Achievements for managing to stay neutral, but it has some problems. The game is full of guns no matter what you do, so you have no choice but to blow off a bunch of heads, and most of the time, it has no karmic effect. The "Impartial Mediation" perk suggests neutral is a good time to resolve the game through talking, but the best mercs are only available to fully good (Fawkes) or evil (Jericho) characters, so who's going to do the shooting? Karmically negative actions are also fully tied to your "wanted" rating, so when you arrive in Megaton, if you pick a fight with Lucas Simms and kill him, there's no karma penalty because he went hostile. It really leaves some role-playing opportunities to be desired.
I believe in the interview the person said cared, and he did imply that they had done focus testing. I have never seen all these post of people being so upset about there not being a moral middle ground in the games you mentioned. If there has been so much dissatisfaction in all those games not including a moral middle ground path, why have you not written a rant before now.
@Eddie2010
Why didn't I write a rant until now if this has been bothering me for a while? Good question. There were two things that really bothered me about what the Infamous developer said.
1. That people didn't care about a moral middle option. I'm sure they did focus testing and that's how they came to that conclusion, but as can be seen from the responses to my rant, that simply isn't the case. People do care. I'll admit that it may not be a majority of gamers, but the audience is still there.
2. They were already working on a neutral option, then cut it. That is the bigger offense in my mind. If they had never attempted a neutral option, then I could forgive them since it was not originally part of their vision for the game. But no, they were originally intending to have a neutral option, but cut it because they didn't think there was an audience for it. They cut out a potential emotional layer to the game that was part of their original vision, and that is what makes me upset. The fact that they justify that cut by saying fans didn't want it in their focus testing just makes it worse.
I find the Good/Evil/no middle ground helps drum home the implications of the choices at time. Having a grey area choice can be a a bit meh. When presented with only a good or evil choice in games I've found myself stopping for a few minutes to wrestle with my conscience, making those scenes far more memorable, where as if there'd been middle ground options where I get some of what I want but without a big guilt trip it would have detracted from the importance and implications of the decisions.
Personally I'd cut the developers some slack. These are games, slices of pick-up and play entertainment. Games can be immersive enough as it is, When they stop being a story and become as nuanced as morally ambiguous real life they become life sims rather than entertainment.