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[JoGribbs]

There is a trend in game development that has been growing a head of steam over the last couple years, and I have some concerns about it. The trend is in support of the notion that game developers need to somehow demonstrate the maturity of their medium and of their own creative capabilities by making games that have a moral – or at least a socially responsible – message. The form this trend often takes is toward features such as morality meters and discrete moral choices at key branching points in game narratives. Now, I certainly have no problem with the ambition of developers to step up to the plate and demonstrate the maturity of the medium and their own creativity. I do, however, worry about some of the approaches.

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To answer your question: it's not really for the player's benefit, it's for the designer's.

[Hangedman]

Personally if there has to be a shoehorned-in "morality" conflict in games, I prefer the tack that some games take with having a conflict between Law and Chaos. And not Law and Chaos in the divine sense, which is just Good versus Evil (except instead of Good being white it's blue and instead of Evil being black it's red), but in the philosophical sense. Neither side is good or evil by any stretch of the imagination, they just have wildly divergent goals.
See: STALKER, SMT games, some other thing

[SirNiko]

If you have a system, it shouldn't be that obvious to the player in my opinion.

Some games do this, and it can be confusing. In Tactics Ogre, for example, the hero begins as "Neutral" and can shift between "Law" and "Chaos" as the game progresses. It turns out this is tied simply to choices the player makes at the end of each chapter, and your alignment is strictly tied to which storyline you choose to follow. This isn't made clear (previous games altered alignment based on whether you killed retreating units or liberated towns with strong units) and so it is common for a player to discover they are chaotic, cannot make the hero a knight class, then desperately (and uselessly) attempt to alter their behavior to try and shift their alignment.

Mostly morality mechanics seem like they're useful as a risk/reward mechanic (defeat foes with non-lethal weapons which is difficult but earns a better prize) or as a roleplaying mechanic (you get to choose between hero and anti-hero).

You might also use them as a means of driving the story (oh no, you killed an innocent and now you feel guilty over it!) but that is easy to ignore if you think about the game in a meta fashion (killing him is optimal to get the +4 gun in chapter 4).

[baconman]

All are basically goal-oriented in some sense, anyways. Morality at it's core is only about your level of consideration for others. You nurture others, they'll (usually) return the favor, but you can't always depend on 100% of everybody to respond in kind. You harm others, and there's quite a greater chance of that being returned (though usually the whole love/hate thing spurns from that kind of thing too; so sometimes that can be surprising). Also factor in that good, challenging competition can be a form of consideration at times, as well.

[bvanevery]

Remove all arbitrary point systems. Actions must only exist, and do nothing more than exist. Any judgement of an act should only be affected by our own preconception of the act.

If a game has to tell you "this is bad" for you to understand it is bad, something is wrong with the game.

Yes that was my reaction as well.  If you're going to criticize the simplicity of good vs. evil in typical games, and instead ask me to justify a terrorist who kills civilian non-combatants, well then as far as I'm concerned just present the actions and let the players decide for themselves what the morality and payoff values of the experiences are.  Rape as many nuns and minors as you see fit.  If you really want to explore morality, tweak your nose at societal notions of morality, ship your game, tell the press all about it, and then wait for the death threats.

[bvanevery]

I'm not interested in sparking some sort of discussion, but I say this because generically terrible actions (murder, theft, etc.) are rarely so simple. There's always a motive. If someone knew before all others what destruction Hitler would cause and assassinated him before he'd risen to power, he'd surely have rotted in prison because of the outside perception of his action, which is generically evil. But was what he did truly immoral?

Yep.  Baking Jews etc. In Ovens Considered Bad [TM].  Not to mention his violent tactics for climbing to power.  He also colluded with an angry society willing to commit atrocities, because they didn't like their dire economic circumstances after WW I.  It's not like he personally invented anti-Semitism or eugenics, he just mobilized those ideas to his advantage.

[bvanevery]

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.

Yeah; also, from a cinematic analysis, "shock" doesn't mean much to an audience.  It doesn't give the audience a chance to understand what happened.

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.

Yeah.  Don't be sneaky, make it explicit.  Call the game "Jew Train."  Or "Fag Train."  Or "Jew Fag Slav Gypsy Undesirable X Y Z Whatever Train."  If you want to have a more exciting life as a game developer, do something to piss the Muslims off.  Then you can have a fatwah and fear for your life.  If you don't think there's any morality, all you have to do is piss off a sufficiently large group of real world people who do think there's such a thing as morality.

Morality = guilt. You have to make a player feel guilty about doing something.

So let's say you write the best torture simulator ever.  Torture humans, torture animals.  Gee what happens when people go out and start torturing people's dogs for real?  Were you moral to write the game?  Why is the player supposed to feel guilty about it?  You the game designer are culpable for the entire game universe.

Let's say the whole game is about crimes against women.  Beat 'em, rape 'em, and snuff 'em.  I don't mean as a diversion when you're supposed to be doing something else, like in the GTA games.  I mean, the only point of the game is to beat, rape, and kill women.  Whole football fields full of 'em, as fast as you can, to rack up the most points.  Some countries surely have laws against this sort of thing.  In the USA it may be protected on First Amendment grounds, although maybe hate crime laws would apply, I don't know.  The public reaction would certainly be ferocious.

You the game designer are culpable here.  You can talk about moral relativism and "games don't matter," but all you have to do to make it matter, is to try hard enough to attach it to reality.  Then people picket you, sue you, jail you, or worse, kill you.

[Squiggly_P]

Troll harder. I'm still not convinced.

[bvanevery]

You've never performed the thought experiment of reprehensible game design?  Why do you bother to talk about morality then?