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[Pineapple]

Skewing the player's perception of morality in the games is something I find very fascinating. Morality is extremely relative, and I find it disappointing when games try to quantify a very indeterminate concept like this. Direct action-consequence is the only good way to go, in my opinion.

At the moment I've got a game idea I'm trying to push myself to make where the entire mentality of the first portion of the game is that you're the hero being guided along by a benevolent (yet occasionally sarcastic and cruel) voice. Then you find out the voice is only trying to lead you to your death. Later on, you kill the being you've been hearing and begin to realize that you may not have been the hero, and the voice may have been justified in its unusual dealings with you. The game later ends with what leaves you completely uncertain whether your final deed in the game was one of justice or one purely of destruction. The idea from the game stemmed from the observation that in most games you kill a virtual enemy and are rewarded for it. In some games there are light and rarely severe consequences. But in no game I'm aware of (with the exception of one, Shadow of the Colossus, which I unfortunately have not had the privilege to play for myself) does the player actually begin to consciously regret what they've done to the virtual characters in their game. The games I consider real art must go beyond the television screen or computer monitor, they must snatch my emotions and manipulate them in a way that shooting up generic, anonymous pixellated characters in an everyday FPS can never do.

I also like to explore this relativity of morals in games I make. Though I'm notorious for not finishing my games, my short Ludum Dare entry, Project Cerebrum, is a good example of what I want games to be like. Real-world moral and ethical situations are never as black-and-white as in games and movies, and I don't understand why the people who make these films and games seem to ignore the fact in almost all cases.

Please play and comment on my LD! I feel so neglected D;

[ezuk]

I think that everyone in this thread has come out against a popup that says “Your alignment has shifted +5 evil.” I agree, but let me play devil’s advocate.  There’s some good reasons that designers do this:

1. It’s immediate feedback. The player is told right away that his actions had an effect.

2. It’s clear. There’s no question what the consequence was.

3. It makes the game transparent. When an NPC treats him as evil two hours later, he’ll know exactly what he did to deserve this, rather than wondering why everyone has developed a new attitude.

I agree that in-game consequences are much more affecting. But it’s a lot more work to make the player see the consequences of her actions in such a rewarding manner.

To conclude, play Deus Ex.

I haven't played it. How does it communicate moral consequences to the player?

At the moment I've got a game idea I'm trying to push myself to make

Hey _Madk, I was hoping that someone would drop into this thread with games ideas that they’d been toying with. Your outline sounds promising. Done right, the game could provide the same type of surprise that System Shock 2 did, followed by some reflective moments. Go for it! Were you thinking of using your action mechanics from your video series last year for this?

[RCIX]

Skewing the player's perception of morality in the games is something I find very fascinating. Morality is extremely relative, and I find it disappointing when games try to quantify a very indeterminate concept like this. Direct action-consequence is the only good way to go, in my opinion.

This is a touchy issue, and very much spills into real world morality arguments. And unless i missed something, there's no disclaimer about that. I won't argue this though, because this thread isn't for that. *hopes that didn't come off as arrogant or something*

I also like to explore this relativity of morals in games I make. Though I'm notorious for not finishing my games, my short Ludum Dare entry, Project Cerebrum, is a good example of what I want games to be like. Real-world moral and ethical situations are never as black-and-white as in games and movies, and I don't understand why the people who make these films and games seem to ignore the fact in almost all cases.

I think that within the context of a game, having no "absolute" moral reference point results in a drab "do whatever you want pointless sandbox". That's not to say you can't present the player with murky decisions (i'd argue that that would make the majority of the fun for games with a morality component), just that you don't say "whatever, any choice you make is fine because all morality is relative". I'd find that a very controversial (and pretty depressing) message.

[Ixis]

I think "Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines" had the best morality system (and not the humanity system.) The reason: it wasn't really there. Every faction had it's own concepts of "good and evil", and throughout the game you either got closer or farther from various factions based on what you did, and they each had various reasons for why they think they're better than everyone else. If you need to have a morality system, basing it on the subjective opinions of the NPCs is a great way to go imo.

[s0]

I think "Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines" had the best morality system (and not the humanity system.) The reason: it wasn't really there. Every faction had it's own concepts of "good and evil", and throughout the game you either got closer or farther from various factions based on what you did, and they each had various reasons for why they think they're better than everyone else. If you need to have a morality system, basing it on the subjective opinions of the NPCs is a great way to go imo.

Another great thing about Bloodlines is that it doesn't fall into the cynicism trap (i.e. "everyone is evil") that some "morally grey" games find themselves in. Each of the factions has understandable motivations for doing what they're doing. Gothic and The Witcher are very similar in their approach to morality.

[Squiggly_P]

As a player, morality simply becomes another variable to the strategy of playing the game, especially in RPG's where the goal for most people is to become the most powerful thing in any given area. As was pointed out already, killing a guy in one part of the game might make someone five thousand miles away suddenly hate your guts. Stuff like that tends to bring me out of a game. You kill a guy and ten seconds later people treat you like crap, even though they don't even know that guy you killed and shouldn't know he's even dead, let alone that you're the one who killed him.

It basically just becomes strategy. You have to have X morality to get Y item, so you do things to alter your morality until you achieve X and can receive Y, then you can do something completely different in order to get Z. It's not a real sense of morality, and I think having a system like that actually makes a player less likely to follow any sort of moral code of their own. The game waves a carrot in front of you, and as a player you're pretty much willing to murder children or rape goats in order to achieve that thing. No matter what the negative consequences are, the player will still do it and they'll still get that carrot and to them it will have all been worth every murderous second.

Players are used to games giving them explicit instructions and goals. Let's say your friend gets kidnapped and you track the kidnapper down to a warehouse or something. You go in to rescue him, but the warehouse gets set on fire. The kidnapper runs off and the game says "chase the bad guy". You chase the bad guy. In the vast majority of games, this means that you're supposed to get the bad guy and either your friend will die in the fire or your friend will somehow escape off-camera. There is usually never an option to save your friend and let the bad guy go. Alternatively, if the game says "Save your friend!", then that bad guy is getting away. Going after him is not an option.

You could literally make a game telling the player to do exactly the opposite of what they're supposed to do and the player will do it and then be frustrated by the fact that he can't do it. You're on the top floor of a 50 story building. The game says "oops! You have about two minutes to get out of the building!", then tell them "You can get out quicker by jumping out the window!" and have a big flashing arrow pointing at the window. They'll jump. They'll always jump. And if they die the first time, they'll probably try again, but be more 'careful' and try to figure out how to properly jump out of the 50 story building and survive. Eventually they might figure out they can use the stairs.

In my opinion the lack of morality in games is really due to this. As gamers we're just so damn used to having our motivations given to us that the idea of NOT doing what the game is telling us to do just seems obviously stupid. Why wouldn't we do what the game tells us to do? The game says I want this sword and that I'll have to kill this other guy to get it, so I guess I'll go do that. This game is telling me to jump on these turtles and kill these nameless guys. If I don't kill them they'll kill me. I guess I'll go do that.

Pulling the rug out at the end of the game with some kind of twist ending that tells you "Hey, you remember all those dudes we told you to kill? Well they were the good guys and you were a huge bastard for killing them. Ha. Ha. Ha." is just a cop out. There was a board game that got linked here a while back, and at the end of the game the players were told that they had actually been playing Nazis and they had been strategically loading jews onto trains or something. That sort of stuff is just cheap. Players are given a victory condition, and meeting those conditions are the only reason the game is being played. It's getting to those conditions that is either fun or not fun. The goal is entirely moot.

If there's no alternative to killing people to advance the game, then what's the point of a morality gauge? If I wanted to give a character my own morality, I wouldn't want to kill ANYONE. I'd want to capture or subdue guys. Games that allow you to do that are few and far between, and the rare ones generally make the game almost impossibly difficult or impose rules that say that you CAN'T kill anyone or you lose, etc. SWAT was like that. Problem is that it pisses you off when you lose for shooting a guy who you have no problem with shooting. Dude was about to shoot my teammate in the face! I can't kill in self defense!? There again, the game is imposing it's own morality...  it's just the exact opposite sort of morality than usual.

Morality = guilt. You have to make a player feel guilty about doing something. You cannot force a player to do that thing and then expect him to feel guilty. You can't attach some kind of horrible punishment to it, as that just makes the player strategically not want to do it. You have to give them a reason to not want to do it, and a reason to feel bad if they do it. That reason can't be punishment.

[RCIX]

I think that within the context of a game, having no "absolute" moral reference point results in a drab "do whatever you want pointless sandbox". That's not to say you can't present the player with murky decisions (i'd argue that that would make the majority of the fun for games with a morality component), just that you don't say "whatever, any choice you make is fine because all morality is relative". I'd find that a very controversial (and pretty depressing) message.

I don't want to come off as a jerk or anything, but you don't seem that you actually played the game; your reply is quite unrelated to the way the perception of morality in the game does work. The game is quite short and the story of it is introduced mainly in the first part of the game. Perhaps you should give it a play.

No, i didn't. I was more talking to the points you made in that section of your post then your game. I might try it though.

TL;DR morals depend more on motives and circumstance than the obvious black-and-white picture that many people try to paint.

Another reason i wanted to avoid the issue of real-world morality is that it's a very short hop away from religion. I'd guess you're some kind of agnostic or atheist?

Your argument basically seems to be "the end can justify the means", which only works if you toss out God and lose your moral role model. This is really straying off topic, so i'll stop here.

[ezuk]

Were you thinking of using your action mechanics from your video series last year for this?

I have a video series? I don't recall ever making one. Link me?

Ack!  A thousand apologies for having confused you with someone else and not double checking before posting.  (Note to self: check things before posting late at night.) 

As a player, morality simply becomes another variable to the strategy of playing the game, especially in RPG's where the goal for most people is to become the most powerful thing in any given area. As was pointed out already, killing a guy in one part of the game might make someone five thousand miles away suddenly hate your guts. Stuff like that tends to bring me out of a game. You kill a guy and ten seconds later people treat you like crap, even though they don't even know that guy you killed and shouldn't know he's even dead, let alone that you're the one who killed him.

It basically just becomes strategy.

The question is, can the morality system become slick or plausible enough so that these breaks in immersion do not occur?  Or will the player always treat such systems as something to game?  I can’t think of any rpg where I didn’t try to game the system to some extent, and I'm on the fence as to whether this has to be the case.

[Pineapple]

The question is, can the morality system become slick or plausible enough so that these breaks in immersion do not occur?  Or will the player always treat such systems as something to game?  I can’t think of any rpg where I didn’t try to game the system to some extent, and I'm on the fence as to whether this has to be the case.

Though it didn't necessarily do so in any moral way, Portal was able to capture my emotions within the game to the point where I didn't feel so much like I was pressing E at the cube, walking up to the furnace, and dropping it. I felt like I was destroying my best and only friend. It's not a far stretch off from a moral dilemma, and I personally see no reason why the same kind of absorption can't involve things like moral decisions. I mentioned earlier, I unfortunately have not played Shadow of the Colossus for myself, but from what I've heard, it throws the player in a situation and tells them to kill these great beasts in order to save the one they love. Only near the end of the game does the player realize the Colossi are hardly monsters, but they still must finish what they'd started.

[Squiggly_P]

I was thinking more about this last night. If games are escapist entertainment where they take on some role they otherwise couldn't, then I don't think you really can have an effective emotional attachment to it. There might be some exceptions, but I can say personally that I've never really been emotionally effected by many games. Maybe a couple of JRPG's got me feeling a tiny bit sad, and there have been games that truly scared the living shit out of me.

Game developers actively avoid complex moral dilemas. They don't put kids in games unless the point of the game is to rescue people or the game is something that involves a kid as the main character. You don't see kids in Oblivion or GTA. Devs know that players would just go around killing them. Not that it would particularly bother the devs, but it would bother parents and probably get them a lot of negative attention. The argument that the player is the only one you can hold responsible for killing kids in a game, while logical, doesn't matter to people. The fact that you allow something like that in your game makes you an evil amoral developer.

The question is, can the morality system become slick or plausible enough so that these breaks in immersion do not occur?  Or will the player always treat such systems as something to game?  I can’t think of any rpg where I didn’t try to game the system to some extent, and I'm on the fence as to whether this has to be the case.

I don't think the game should register any sort of morality at all. Morality is a personal thing. I might think something is totally moral and just while someone else might think it's horrible and evil. For instance, I have no problem with legalizing pot, prostitution and gay marriage (sorry if it offends anyone to have gay marriage lumped in with prostitution and drug use ). There are a lot of people out there who disagree with me. If you're a game developer and you were making a game that involved those things, would visiting a brothel lower your moral standing? Would drug use? If another character didn't like me as much because I smoked pot and screwed hookers, that's not MY morality it's THEIR morality. You'd have to give every major character their own personal morality meter in order to make it behave properly.

But if you acknowledge it within the mechanics of the game at all it just becomes something to game. The same goes for love or just about any sort of emotion. If the player isn't actually feeling it, then it's just a game mechanic to be abused. Besides, you look at games in the past and they're largely all about mowing down vast numbers of people. You can't just slap a morality meter on something and undo a couple decades worth of not giving a shit about the pixels you're shooting. According to those games, killing pixel people is totally moral and all the various lewd behavior in various games is just comedy.

The way I see it, the way to manipulate a player's morality is to make a game that has a rich world, well executed characters and a well written story that branches or is otherwise fluid and dynamic that the player can directly impact due to their actions. If you want a player to feel bad about anything, be it sadness due to the loss of an ally, or guilt over burning down some village, that's gonna come from making the game as personal as possible.

[Dozer]

The entire thread was a bit long... so I didn't read it, which means that this may have been mentioned already. Instead of some sort of slider, how about using reactions from different NPCs. Let's say you kill ten bandits. People from a nearby town would praise you, but the bandit leader who also has his hideout in said town is gonna be pissed at you. Now let's say instead of killing the bandits, you are going to kill and loot the bodies of ten traveling merchants, who reside at the same town as mentioned before. Now the townsfolk will be pissed at you, but so will the bandit leader for invading his territory. Instead of "Good and Evil" you can use simple reactions. What would appeal to some may not appeal to others, but that doesn't necessarily make anything good or evil. It's all a manner of perspective. Now if you don't mind I am going to punch some babies and eat my kitten soup 

[gimymblert]

Great point Dozer, it's not exactly "consequence" which was brought up many time, But certainly a great way to convey morality and bring some role play.

The problem with consequence was it was mechanically tied to player's action and may have been obscure if not foreshadow enough. Instant feedback on clear situation work better for the experience, but without consequence may end up shallow in the long terms.

I think way of the samourai work like that, and the very first situation work like you said: There is bandits that assault a woman, you can either killed the bandits (and then be receive like a hero at her village), killed the girl and share the loot with the bandits, simply ignore the event and get nothing or kill everyone and keep everything for you.

[Muz]

Great points, Squiggly_P. I hadn't really thought of it that way. If you want to have morality mechanics, they have to merge very well with the game's objectives. I think Iji did the best implementations of morals so far. It tells you early on that killing is bad, suggests that you can win the game without hurting anyone, and in the end, it actually makes you feel bad about killing people. The bad feeling comes not simply because you were labeled a bad guy, but because you could've played a different way and gotten a different ending.

On the other hand, Lose/Lose practically yells "If you kill aliens, you are retarded and immoral!" It doesn't come out as very clever or philosophical, because it gives you an objective and taunts you for not achieving it. The morality doesn't shine so well because it goes against what you're asked to achieve.


I think basically the whole reason to put morality in a game is for the game to react to your actions. It shouldn't be that the game is judging you for being good or evil. Instead, it should be used as a tool for depth to reflect what you're doing. If you do some very bad things, but the game doesn't recognize them, then you feel a little left out. If you do some very bad things, but the game treats you like some hero because you donated a pile of gold and killed some villain, then the result is even worse than with no morality system at all.

If you can directly have actions without involving some kind of morality counter, I think that's clearly the best way to approach it. The factions idea is a nice middle ground too, because it solves the other problem with deciding how the storyline goes when you give the player a million choices.

Hmm... looks like the real question is not morality mechanics, but having the game react to the player's actions.

[gimymblert]

I have been thinking. We always talk of morality mecanics as big globale scale (except for personal relationship with characters) But what about local morality: you trigger an event chain with its own scale to manage its flow. Could open even more nuance if we mix it with other system. Imagine event chain trigger by globale scale and take into account faction and relation, it's own scale would be an instance of the higher morality scheme to showcase a particular nuance of the scheme, character would be recruit by the event to fill story function according to the tension between their faction and relation scale.

What do you think of that?

[starsrift]

IMHO, an old Amiga game called "Swords of Twilight" handled morality mechanics better than most games I've seen since. Though it wasn't exactly morality, so much of an attitude & responses system. IIRC you had four verbal "stances", "Friendly", "Polite", "Wary", and "Hostile", and the NPC's would also use these attitudes and change them according to your actions towards them and their allies.
Morality in B&W also deserves a mention, mostly because there were many times you could more evil or good - that is to say, it was using a slider, but it had more depth.

[RCIX]

The big issue with most of these suggestions i see to provide a better morality system is that it ends up tossing out morality.

concern with the distinction between good and evil or right and wrong; right or good conduct

Anything that attempts to get rid of the "good and evil" part is like trying to make an apple pie without the apple

[JoGribbs]

Relevant

[Chandagnac]

IMO, a bad morality systems is one that judges your actions on behalf of the developers. As in, the developers believe that action A is evil, and as such you'll see a pop-up giving you evil points if you commit action A. Doing things like that implies some sort of ever-watching omnipotent being judging your actions. It doesn't really fit morality.

A better way to do it is to try an emulate the way morality works in real life. You yourself have to judge whether you think committing action A is right or wrong, but you'll get a pop-up saying that the character A believes that was evil. More complex, more interesting, and it's only Character A judging you, not the omnipotent morality sky-beast.

[SirNiko]

I feel like the developers have to judge which actions are good and which actions are evil.

You could get around that, I suppose, by letting the player decide the reaction of NPCs. For example, you get into a shootout with a badguy and you kill a hostage to get him. Your logic is that killing one hostage meant saving the rest. Then you get to choose via a pop-up menu whether your love interest is sad but accepting, hostile or thinks you're awesome for making the right decision. Would that be unsatisfying to get to choose?

If you don't pick, then the developers need to decide how the love interest reacts for you. That means the developers have to judge your actions.

[Squiggly_P]

If you have a system, it shouldn't be that obvious to the player in my opinion. You're supposed to hide the technical details that hold the world together and make it work. Having a system where the player can see his moral alignment in detail with a point tally and hw it affects other characters seems like a bad idea. It would be like having a big button in Half Life with a sign over it that said "Press button to have monster suddenly burst through wall". It's more fun to just have the monster explode through the wall for apparently no reason. Obviously there IS a reason - the player hit a proximity trigger or something.

What is the goal of having a morality system, anyway? What are we trying to accomplish as it pertains to the player?