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.

Choices in the Virtual World Part 2: Or The Lack Thereof

In my last post I talked about how changing the way I played a game completely altered the experience. If Far Cry 2 hadn't been designed to offer a stealthy option it is very likely I would have given up on it, and sold it promptly. As it is I have actually stopped playing Fallout 3 for the time being. Speaking of Fallout 3, I prefer the stealthy approach in that game as well, but as an action RPG it is required to give the player some choice in how it is played. The option for stealth in Far Cry 2 surprised me. It gave me a choice I didn't expect to be there. Since Fallout 3 is an RPG of sorts I fully expect it to offer me choices.

World of Warcraft is also an RPG. I expect it to offer choices, and on the surface it seems to. There are two factions, several races, and at least a dozen classes. I admit to not knowing the exact numbers because I left the game before any of the expansions released, and looking them up is worth it as the exact numbers are irrelevant to my point.

My first character in World of Warcraft was a human warrior. I always opt for the most straightforward class in any new RPG until I figure out the intricacies of the game. I played that class for about twenty levels before I decided to try something new. Basically it involved targeting a monster, activating my powers, waiting for the cooldown period, rinse and repeat.

Then I tried a paladin. Not much different from a warrior, but a little more versatile. Combat involved targeting a monster, activating my powers, waiting for the cooldown, rinse and repeat. It ended up being really similar in fact so I figured I would try a rogue. I'm a fan of stealth after all. Combat involved activating a power, targeting a monster, activating my other powers, waiting for the cooldown, rinse and repeat. I think you can see where I'm going with this.

I played every class in pre-expansion World of Warcraft, and all of them were incredibly similar. Playing a sword wielding human warrior didn't feel any different from playing an arcane missile throwing wizard. Playing a rogue didn't feel stealthy. It all boiled down to the same thing.

The problem is there are actually very few ways to interact with the environment in World of Warcraft. Once you pull aggro in a fight the monster either lobs ranged attacks, or immediately charges right at you. You can stun them, or get them to attack someone else in various ways depending on your class, but the enemy AI has a single track mind.

Let me compare this situation with Far Cry 2. In that game sniping someone from distance will have some enemies take cover while others attempt to flank where the shot came from. Setting things on fire will cause enemies to run from the flames. Blowing something up will cause those nearby to scatter, and far away enemies to investigate the explosion. You can hide in cover to lose pursuers. You can cause distractions by setting off a bomb on the other side of camp. You can do all of these things in a game that features no class or skill systems.

You may say I'm just picking on the combat, but combat is the crux of the game. How many quests in World of Warcraft can be completed without any fighting? If combat wasn't the main focus of WoW the rogue would have interesting things to do, but as it is the rogue is one of the main damage dealing classes.

I loved the Thief series. In those games you played a thief doing what thieves do. You stole things, and generally avoided combat (at least in the good missions) unless you could end it one blow while the other guy wasn't looking. Hiding in the shadows in those games actually meant hiding in the shadows. In WoW you active your power, and hope your stealth skill is high enough to make you transparent. Somehow it is less enthralling. Once you are transparent you generally just stab things in the back that are beating on your group's tank.

Speaking of beating on things, the warrior in WoW mostly just sits there yelling at enemies to keep them from stomping the other members of the group into the ground. Your job as a fearless front line combatant is not so much to mix it up with various baddies, but to serve as a meat shield. Keeping the squishier members of a party from being torn to ribbons has always been the tank's job, but would it kill an MMO developer to give them something more interesting to do? In WoW in particular your character is always so out of breath from hurling invective at a group of gnolls he rarely has enough energy to go on the offensive. Why bother even giving him a weapon? Maybe he should have a shield in both hands.

Imagine if Soul Calibur was simply a game of the dozens between two well armored fighters. Not much fun, right? Hitting things with other things is a fighter's job, but it doesn't work that way in MMOs because the AI attacks whatever hits them for the biggest damage, and a wizard's fireball of doom is going to hurt more than any sword. So the warrior has to distract the enemy from that pesky glass artillery with some choice comments about their breeding.

I'm a big enough geek to have played Dungeons and Dragons with dice. The great thing about that is the endless freedom you have. That kind of freedom can never be replicated by a video game because the way the game world is constructed already puts limits on the players, but what I'm trying to illustrate is various classes in MMOs interact with their world in the same ways despite their supposed differences, and this does not play to the strengths of of a role playing game.

Imagine an MMO in which the rogue played like Garret from Thief, the warrior felt like a character from Soul Calibur, and the wizard used something similar to the celestial brush from Okami. These are very different mechanics well suited to very different roles, and would actually allow for gameplay difference between classes. All of the MMOs I've played offer what I call the illusion of choice, giving the player many different races, and classes that play essentially the same way. The genre is capable of so much more.

If you don't like the game; change the rules

Recently I've been playing a lot of Far Cry 2 on the 360.

At first I couldn't tell if I liked, or hated it.

The game is an open world first person shooter set in 50 square kilometers of Africa that includes desert, savanna, and jungle terrain. While I doubt any part of Africa has all of those elements packed into such a small size relative to the continent it works wonderfully in the game by providing an interesting, and varied world in which to kill people, and blow shit up. The missions are admittedly repetitive. All of them boil down to being assassination, sabotage, or retrieval jobs, but the way you go about them is entirely up to you, and you are given the tools to facilitate different approaches.

There are checkpoints spread throughout the map on all of the major roads, and I don't mean checkpoints in the traditional game sense. I mean guard posts. The guards at these posts respawn almost as soon as you turn your back, and early in the game driving through these became tedious as I just wanted to get to my next mission. It didn't help that many missions required reporting back to whomever you were working for. You can try to just blaze through these guard posts in a vehicle, but when your vehicle gets shot up it slows down as the condition degrades to the point black smoke is billowing out of the engine compartment, and the guards almost always give chase in a vehicle that is faster than your own. So I usually rolled into the middle of a post, hopped on the .50 caliber machine gun mounted to my truck, and mowed people down. This was amusing the first few times, but as I said it became tedious quickly, and was seriously detracting from my enjoyment of the game. So what to do?

I found a bit of wisdom on GameFAQs of all places. In a forum no less. Anyone familiar with GameFAQS forums knows why this might be surprising. For every thoughtful contributor who has written up a dozen walkthroughs there are a hundred histrionic fanboys screaming at each other, but I digress. Someone started a thread about walking from mission to mission instead of driving. At first I was skeptical. After all this was a huge game world to navigate, and my main frustration was not being able to get to my missions quickly enough, but I gave it a try, and it changed the entire experience.

In Far Cry 2 you can carry three weapons at a time. I had been rolling with an assault rifle, RPG, and side arm. This was good for charging into places, and shooting everything that moved, but even with this high profile loadout I never charged the front once I reached my mission objective. So I invested in some weapons that offered a more subtle approach; a sniper rifle, a silenced pistol, and remote explosives.

By walking I could now sneak past enemy guard posts, and carry on towards my mission, but I also discovered each post could be scouted. All of them had supplies, and once scouted my map would show me which posts had ammo, health, or explosives I could loot. I now sniped guards from distance, left remote explosives in my old position, and took up a new one where I could watch the search party come looking for me so I could blow them up when they found the spot I had just left. Not only did negotiating guard posts become easier, but also it became more fun. By varying my tactics, and weapons I changed the game from a standard action FPS to something of a stealth game. I now wanted to scout each guard post rather than bypass them.

I didn't like the game until I changed the rules.

Microsoft and their lack of user friendliness.

Did you know there is absolutely no way to remove credit card information from Xbox Live? You can add a new card, but if you are like me, and have an old card all your transactions default to that is no longer valid, there is no recourse for removing it.

What the hell? Imagine if Amazon, or eBay didn't let you remove old payment information. What if Paypal had a list of all your bank accounts since you started the service, and you've moved across the country? It's patently ridiculous.

You can add new cards until your eyes bleed, but removing one is impossible. You can't do it from the Xbox, and you can't do it from Microsoft's website for the Xbox.

Xbox Live is a subscription service, and one that automatically recurs. I'm willing to bet when my time comes to pay more money it will default to my old card, but since I can't remove that information there is little I can do. I can't even set one of the cards to my default payment method.

For bonus points there is also no option to cancel your subscription. At least not on the interface that allows you to give Microsoft money, and apparently not on their website either. Oh no. You have to call somebody directly for that.

I did a Google search, and some poor bastard in the U.K not only had to contact customer support to remove his credit card information from Xbox Live, but his problem was passed on to a "special team," and it took them three and a half months to resolve it.

I understand from a business point of view that Microsoft doesn't want the cancel button to be the first thing you see when you log onto Live, but this is bullshit. It pisses me off, and I don't even want to cancel my account.

Choices in the virtual world.

Dr. Richard Bartle is upset that a quest in Wrath of the Lich King requires the player to torture a prisoner.

I'm not going to become morally outraged over virtual torture no matter how blithely it is implemented. After all WoW has virtual genocide too. How many quests require exterminating entire populations of intelligent beings? If you think I'm nuts ask yourself how many mines full of kobolds, and settlements of murlocs you've killed. Anyway I'm pretty sure the Geneva convention doesn't apply to Azeroth.

I'm not trying to mock Dr. Bartle. I think he makes a good point, and I don't think he is morally outraged about the inclusion of torture. He doesn't like the fact it is required. The quest offers no option to refuse, which exposes a fundamental flaw in the gameplay of World of Warcraft, and MMOs in general; lack of choices.

Back in the 90s during the golden age of PC gaming I played a lot of Diablo, and after that I went on to Baldur's Gate. What impressed me the most about Baldur's Gate when I made this transition was the size of the world, and the possibilities it offered. Diablo was a straightforward hack and slash (or click and click) affair. It had a linear story, and one multilevel dungeon under a single town. Baldur's Gate seemed like an entire continent to explore in comparison. There were a lot of other difference as well, but this expansion of possibilities was the key factor for me. So when I discovered Ultima Online, and the new genre called MMORPGs I became even more excited at the possibilities that would open up in such an expanded world.

To this day UO remains my favorite MMO of all time simply because there were so many things to do in between running for your life from player killers. There was a world filled with people to explore, and tons of skills to figure out how to use effectively. There weren't any scripted moral choices that are so popular in games today, but there was a ton of perceived freedom.

For a lot of people, however, Everquest kick started the MMO genre, and it set forth a lot of rules that are obeyed to this day. When I think of Everquest I think of grinding. The eternal pursuit of the next level. The freedom vanished. Pick your class, and start killing things.

Fast forward to World of Warcraft. For all of the open world possibilities I hoped MMOs would bring to video games the most successful one is like Diablo; a straightforward hack and slash affair. All of your choices are made at character creation except for choosing which abilities to improve. Your quests are laid out before you in an orderly fashion, and you simply climb the ladder, moving on to another area when you are finished with the current one. If Ultima Online was like making your way through a pathless jungle WoW is the guided tour conducted from a tram.

Don't get me wrong. Linearity isn't inherently a bad thing. Half Life 2 is completely linear, but it sucks you in, and doesn't let go. MMO marketing usually bangs on about how immersive the game world is. Really? I can't think of a less immersive genre. It all comes down to the numbers. Exploration is gone. Freedom is gone. What is the point of this gigantic world if everyone walks exactly the same path through it?

In Ultima Online I explored dungeons to see what was in there. In WoW I explored them because at the bottom was something I had to kill to get a reward from some guy who always stood in the same place in town.

So back to this whole torture bit. Dr. Bartle wants the choice to refuse something he finds morally objectionable. I say the player could use a choice in every quest, or at least some latitude in how to go about them. Linearity is fine, but it isn't what I wanted from MMOs.

My second favorite MMO? Star Wars Galaxies. Yeah. I'm weird like that, but for all of its glaring flaws it offered a hell of a lot of freedom.