Choices in the Virtual World Part 3: Morality, Romance, and Emotional Investment

When most developers talk about choices in their games these days they are talking about moral choices. Morality isn't new to video games, but it does seem to be gaining popularity. Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto 4, Fable 2, Bioshock, and The Witcher are all relatively recent games that have included moral choices with varying degrees of effectiveness. How well it works relies on many things, but one of the most important is the player's emotional investment in the game.

First up is Fable 2, which offers little to no emotional investment for the player. The moral choices in this game revolve around either protecting or murdering various other characters, and the characters in Fable 2 are either trite cliches, or complete nonentities. All of the main characters are in the cliche group, but you can't murder them in any case, which leaves all of the people you can interact with relegated to the status of an extra in a movie. You can slaughter townsfolk literally for hours once you're strong enough to fend off the guards, and it makes your appearance skew towards devilish, and everyone hates you, but it has no impact on the player. None of these people mean anything. I would have felt more regret stomping on ants. So there is no hesitation to kill whomever you like in Fable 2. In short being evil doesn't feel evil, and this is a game in which you can marry someone, and then sacrifice them at an evil temple. Fable 2 remained lighthearted to me even when I pushed my spouse off a cliff, which I did mainly for giggles. So really it fails in two categories; morality and romance. Neither has any impact on the player.

Now before anyone starts calling me a sociopath let me illustrate some times when I did have emotional investment.

Bioshock asks the player if they are willing to murder little girls to gain power. The genetically modified little sisters were once innocent children, but not harvest a substance called adam from corpses. Adam allows you to increase your ability to shoot bees from your fist among other things, and if you suck all of it out of a little sister she dies. First you have to kill the big daddy, which is a behemoth that protects the little sister at all costs, and once they are dead the manipulation o the players emotions begins as the little sister sobs, and urges Mr. Bubbles to get up. The first littler sister you encounter actually backs away from you and whimpers as you approach after having killed her protector. Instead of outright murdering the little sister you can restore her humanity, and gain a smaller amount of adam. I could never bring myself to harvest the full amount, killing the little sister. It is a consequence free decision that even offers a substantial reward, but I didn't want to be that person; even virtually.

In the masterpiece that is Half Life 2 the player is often accompanied by Alyx Vance, and throughout the game there is a subtext of romance between her, and the protagonist Gordon Freeman despite the fact Freeman never utters a single word. There is a point in one of the episodic expansions in which she seems to be killed, and it has at least the same impact of seeing your favorite character in a book, or movie die. Possibly it has more impact because through the mute avatar of Freeman you are more immersed in the experience. The point is Alyx from HL2 is likable. She has personality that the NPCs of Fable 2 lack. That is why her affection, and her death mean more. Later in the game someone else actually does die, and it means more than the hundreds of screaming victims of my killing spree in Fable 2 ever could.

Grand Theft Auto 4 suffers from a similar problem to Fable 2 in regards to morality. The story asks the player to make moral choices in between running over old ladies with a garbage truck. The characters in GTA 4 are more fleshed out than the ones in Fable 2, but the game world is still filled with completely anonymous NPCs that mean less than ants. One of the main draws of the Grand Theft Auto series has always been the mayhem the player can unleash on an unsuspecting city. In this context morality is marginalized. In the missions when you are asked to choose who lives, and who dies it invariably comes down to killing the biggest jerk. The one good person in the entire game who also happens to be a love interest dies at the end depending on the choices the player makes, and though your character is enraged at this it fails to translate to the player. Basically in GTA 4 morality, and romance take a backseat to cutting a bloody swath through people who piss you off despite the story's intentions.

The Witcher takes a different approach to morality. The choices you make have consequences, but it is often hard to tell what is the right thing to do. Early in the game you are sen to protect a shipment of weapons from some monsters, and once you do a group of nonhumans fighting to establish some power in a human run world shows up, looking to collect the shipment. These people are basically terrorists, and you have no way of knowing if they are actually the buyers. On the other hand they are genuinely oppressed by the humans. You can either let them have the weapons, or fight them. You have to make a choice, but I've tried it both ways, and didn't feel good about either of them. This game will have you doubting your actions.

Later in The Witcher you are hunting a cockatrice in a sewer, and run into a human knight from the order largely responsible for oppressing non humans. You can team up with him, or go it alone, but he seems genuinely heroic, and is one of the few humans who treats you with respect. Still later in the game he requests your help in fighting off the nonhuman group you encountered earlier if you helped him in the sewers. He seems interested in saving lives, but his orders seems intent on wiping out nonhumans. The nonhumans are trying to stand up for themselves, but also murder innocent people. It isn't clear cut, and you never have all the information you would want when you have to choose. It is effective, but it can also be incredibly frustrating when your actions you weren't sure about have unforeseen consequences.

While the morality in The Witcher is effective the romance fails. You play Geralt, whose inability to breed, and immunity to disease has apparently made him into a manwhore. You have the option to sleep with a variety of women throughout the game, and even get collectible cards of them after doing so. Hilarious yes, but it undermines any possible importance of the two women who are supposed to be your main love interests, and between whom you must eventually choose. At one point Geralt even gets drunk with his buddies while agonizing over the choice. Not only does it not affect the player it also seems out of character given his propensity for James Bond style promiscuity.

The beginning of Fallout 3 is brilliant. You actually play through your childhood in short segments while selecting your character traits in a way that endears your father to you, which makes a great setup for instilling the desire to find him once he disappears. That desire takes a backseat once you enter the vast playground that is the Wasteland, but the attempt is at least made to make the player feel the desires of the character rather than just taking them for granted.

It is clear games are advancing as an art form. I doubt anyone had emotional investment in Pong, Asteroids, or Pac-Man. Right now they are borrowing heavily from film to achieve this investment. They mostly show you things to manipulate your emotions, and they usually give you an easy out for doing the right thing. Most of the time doing the right thing morally gives a greater reward in the game as well.

A classic example of doing the right thing resulting in a greater reward occurs in Baldur's Gate. You enter a town, and are mistaken for a bounty hunter named Greywolf. The man who pays bounties offers you the latest reward Greywolf has earned, and you can make some easy money. If you do this, however, the mistake is eventually realized, and you can't capitalize on the further bounty jobs offered, which result in still greater rewards. In this way it feels like a morality tale. There is nothing wrong with doing the right thing, but the lure of evil is that it is the easier path to greater rewards, but in video games this is often not the case. In anything made by Black Isle, or Bioware being evil is just a matter of wanting to be a jerk, and often times in a storyline where you have to accomplish something good regardless of your inclination.

Very few games will make the player hesitate before pulling the trigger. Even fewer will grant greater power to those willing to sacrifice others. Even the ones that do allow an evil ending alter the status quo in a similar fashion to the good ending. The current evil power is overthrown even if only to be replaced by the corrupt protagonist.

Mass Effect has at least one moment of brilliance in regard to morality. A member of the player's party, Wrex, is a Krogan; a species that is going extinct. Seren, the antagonist of the game has found a way to cure the process that keeps Krogan from breeding so he can build a personal army. The facility that allows this to happen has to be destroyed for the greater good, which makes Wrex understandably upset, and he pulls a gun on the player. The player can shoot Wrex, have someone else shoot Wrex, or talk him down. I was able to talk him down, and would have been upset with myself if I had been forced to kill him because not only did I sympathize with Wrex's plight, but also he was my favorite character. The easy path was to pull the trigger, but I didn't want to, and not because Wrex was a valuable ally in combat.

Video games are just like movies, and books in that to have an emotional impact they must develop interesting and/or likable characters, and put them in harm's way. The strength of the game is that the player can decide who lives, and dies. The player also decides who the protagonist falls for. For these decisions to mean anything the characters have to mean something as well.