It was when playing Bithell game’s new title
Quarentine Circular, that I was hit with a
real rarity in videogames, an honest-to-god
moral choice with no easy answer.
Let me lay it out for you.
I was playing as an engineer, who had the
unenviable task of setting up communications
with alien first contact.
After getting talking to this tank of an arthropod
named gabriel, it asks me a question.
It has a shock collar on it that prevents
it from moving out of this tiny circle, will
you disable it?
This really stumped me.
Despite having a binary choice to make, there
were so many factors to consider.
Gabriel seems nice but is he lying?
How did he get captured in the first place
he looks like he could stop a train, why did
he come here?
Should we implicitly trust technologically
advanced outsiders because that didn’t go
well for indigenous cultures in the past,
but maybe he’s a diplomat, or a scientist?
We don’t even know his society's’ values!
Videogames are great at posing moral questions,
because unlike in any other medium it’s
us that gets to choose the answer.
And that’s what moral questions are really,
the most open-ended possible puzzles, and
they challenge a totally different part of
the brain to tests of mechanical skill and
tactical thinking.
They’re unique because the interesting part
isn’t making things happen, but seeing how
your choices unfold.
You’d think given the ability of videogames
to enable player choice and more importantly
the consequences of those choices, we’d
have a flourishing culture of games that are
all about explorations of morality and ethics,
but we kind of don’t.
There are of course some great notable exceptions
that i’ll be getting around to later, but
for every game with some sort of morality
system, very very few ever seem to pull it
off well.
I’ve spent a while mulling it over, and
I think I may have found the source of the
problem, weirdly.
I think the issue lies with morality systems
themselves.
Now, it sounds like I’ve finally lost it
but, let me explain myself.
Traditional game design wisdom, broadly speaking,
holds that integrating all the different parts
of your game is a good idea.
In half life 2’s best level, Ravenholm,
the physics system, gunplay, puzzles and aesthetic
design all work together to create an awesome
expereince.
Because of this philosophy, however, morality
and ethics get tied into games in a way that
hurts them.
They’re represented through systems like
karma meter related statboosts and content
gating or different endings based on your
choices.
The problem with this approach is that it’s
inelegant, in attaching straight up gameplay
bonuses to moral choices, you make them easily
solvable, turning an ethical choice into a
strategic one.
Take knights of the old republic for example-
its morality system, which measures your devotion
to the light or dark side of the force actively
selects against making decisions on an ethical
basis.
The more devoted you are to the light or dark
side of the force, the cheaper certain force
power get, and if you go really far, you get
some nice stat boosts.
That means that any attempt to make a decision
based on your ethical reasoning is a decision
to make the game potentially harder for yourself,
and that’s not a choice most players are
going to make.
This sucks even more in KOTOR 2 which includes
Kreia, a mentor figure who picks apart your
reasoning for every choice you made and she’s
brilliantly written, she’s the most balanced
and nuanced take on the light and dark sides
of the force in the whole starwars canon,
unfortunately, the emotional kick of having
your moral choices torn apart doesn’t really
have the desired effect because more often
than not you didn’t make them for moral
reasons, but because you were doing a light
or dark side playthrough.
Kotor is pretty easy pickings, but morality
systems can scupper even games with supposedly
much more nuanced takes, such as dishonored.
In this game your morality is measured by
how far the city has fallen into chaos.
Stuff like killing people raises the chaos
level and causes more guards to appear in
later levels as well as gives you the quote
on quote bad ending.
Low chaos runs require you to be merciful
and gives you a much nicer ending because
despite being dishonored, you remained honorable
and were still a good person see it’s this
whole thing, it’s real subtle.
The issue here is that the pretty much binary
nature of low and high chaos means that low
chaos is heavily coded as being the more ethical
and nicer route to follow, despite being anything
but.
The nonlethal resolutions to the various missions
see you doing some truly horrible stuff, like
drugging a lady and essentially selling her
to a stalker who’s going to keep her as
a slave.
The choice of just murdering lady boyle vs
force feeding dunwall the red pill is an interesting
moral dilemma that dishonored halfheartedly
tries to get you to consider before telling
you that you’re a good person just because
the people you delivered into the hands of
a rapist or sold into slavery didn’t die.
Without the chaos system in place, you’d
be made to figure out the best way to get
what you want, taking into account ethics
versus practicality and the potential consequences
of your actions, but with it, the nuance and
ambiguity is removed and we’re left with
a system that denounces a mercy killing and
praises slavery.
Moral decisions are interesting because we
get to explore the consequences, and I think
the mistake that a lot of developers make
is that they assume that without seeing immediate
feedback for our choices, players will think
they have no agency, but it’s attemtps to
rectify that in KOTOR and dishonored that
actually make them less interesting.
Longterm consequences for your decisions are
actually fine.
Let’s compare frostpunk and darkest dungeon,
two games that explore the allure of becoming
a monster whilst chasing the greater good
in subtley different ways, one great, one
not so great.
Spoilers for Frostpunk by the way, so skip
ahead to this time, if you don’t want to
see them.
Frostpunk sees you controlling the last city
on earth, built around this giant generator
in order to try and survive an endless, apocalyptic
winter.
To do that you’ll need to sign laws to keep
people in line and make sure that society
doesn’t crumble- this is great, because
all the most useful ones carry a heavy moral
toll, for example forcing kids to work in
the coal mines and frostpunk is difficult
enough to make these choices really worth
considering.
I made some really tough calls during my frostpunk
campaign, I tried to uphold strict moral values
to keep my people happy, but eventually I
needed to create a religious secret police
to control theft and I had to perform some
emergency triage to prepare for the big endgame
superstorm.
During that storm, in the eleventh hour, when
my people were starving and sick, with mere
hours to go before the storm passed, I made
the ultimate choice, in order to save the
city and possibly humanity, I sent a child
into the bowels of the overworked generator
to fix it buy us a few precious more hours,
killing them in the process.
Humanity survived, and I was greeted with
the text “we didn’t cross the line”...
what what?
The quite genuine remorse I felt was completely
undercut by the game thinking I’d done an
ethical job as ruler, I sacrificed a kid!
It turns out that frostpunk secretly tallies
up how many evil decisions you make, stuff
like banishing dissidents or instating yourself
as dictator and only at the end of the game
does it tell you if you made too many, and
that’s about all you get as far as feedback.
I was looking forward to a little blurb about
how my city ended up fairing, whether my strict
soup policy lead to malnourishment, whether
the sacrificial child was remembered or what
became of my secret police, but I didn’t
really get anything, just a good job!
Sticker.
Frostpunk falls at the very last hurdle by
adding a mechanical dimension to its morality,
if the ending was something more neutral or
explored my decisions in more depth then they’d
feel much more impactful.
However, by making the powerful, evil laws
contribute to little more than a bad ending,
the entire morality system becomes essentially
just difficulty setting, and the moral element
is removed entirely, instead of regret, I
now just feel disappointed, I only had to
feed that kid to prometheus because I’m
bad at frostpunk.
Darkest dungeon on the other hand doesn’t
judge, instead it just shows you the consequences.
In double D, heroes that fight in the dark
get more loot, but get more stressed, and
seeing them unravel, turn on eachother and
give into despair is not pleasant to watch.
Stressed heroes must turn to stuff like drink
or flagellation, or you can just hurl the
broken wretches onto the streets and pickup
a fresh batch of chumps in the morning, saving
you some precious cash.
In a scathing commentary on the internship
model, darkest dungeon encourages you to be
heartless in order to beat back the otherworly
corruption that has infested the hamlet, and
it’s only when when the realization sets
in that you’re treading down the same path
as your ancestor do you also realise it’s
too late to stop, besides what’s one more
life in exchange for that nice shiny trinket?
Because it’s freed from the shackles of
a morality system, darkest dungeon’s ethics
are organic, slow burning, and aren’t dicated
by outside factors.
You can choose to be a nice guy, saving or
treating your favourite heroes to make them
stronger and not feel like you’re playing
the game wrong, but the option to become a
monster is always going to be there, and that
choice is made harder because you won’t
get a bad ending for giving in.
Another example is Papers Please, which excellently
works in moral decisions by letting you choose
to how and to what extent you become corrupt.
At its most simple the game is about being
a border control agent for a country that’s
definitely not soviet russia and deciding
who to let in and who to keep out.
You’re pretty much never going to be able
to keep up with arstotzka’s regulations
and pay your families bills, so in order to
make money, you’re going to have to break
the rules.
The genius here is that papers please lets
you become moral arbiter of arstotzka, is
it worth taking the payout for locking up
an innocent man who’s an asshole?
Should you work with terrorists in order to
save your family?
Honestly, I dunno.
If a morality system that rewarded you for
acting a certain way existed then these questions
would have defacto answers, but they don’t,
which makes the simple yes or no choice way
more engaging.
The actually quite generous two free mistakes
a day also gives you the opportunity to make
ethical decisions like reuniting a husband
with his wife even though she didn’t have
a passport.
Whilst the overarching morality of papers
is fairly simplistic, you need to become corrupt
in order to survive, the smaller more intimate
decisions are loaded with moral nuance because
you can only save or damn so many, but it’s
up to you to choose who, all whilst balancing
your own needs.
Papers please never says whether you’re
a saint or a sinner, because it knows that
morality is much more complex than that.
Morality systems are an implicit judgement
of the player, even if they don’t offer
any sort of observable bonuses, there’s
almost always a right and a wrong way to interact
with them.
Instead, developers need to create ways of
exploring the consequences of a player’s
decision, whilst leaving the right or wrong
of it all up to their subjective experience
Some more great ways to integrate morality
in this way could be to use Fallout’s endgame
slideshows to give the world and how you affected
it a sense of permanence and cohesion beyond
immediate gameplay effects.
Or to make the player juggle companion-slash-faction
reputation meters, which encourages them to
consider what the consequences of their decisions
will be on a more interpersonal level, the
right thing to do isn’t always popular,
after all.
These two approaches are great because they
add depth without making an judgement of the
decisions themselves, they’re just another
way the consequences can manifest.
Which of course isn’t to say that games
with morality systems are just straight up
bad- they’re not!
Frostpunk in particular is a surprise hit,
I really like that game but it doesn’t deliver
on its promise of exploring the kind of person
you become when pushed to the brink, games
with morality systems are much better at conveying
a single message- re-enforced by tying it
to the mechanics.
In the case of frostpunk, the sickly-sweet
allure of facism.
Undertale is a game all about morality and
it’s got the most simplistic, binary morality
system ever, you just choose between kill
or be killed.
I’ll avoid giving away the twists and turns,
but by leaning into this, and encouraging
players to commit to either style, Undertale
can tell two completely distinct stories,
each approaching the idea of determination
from two different directions.
Not only would a more organic, consequence
driven undertale have been impossible to make,
but it would undermine the game’s extremely
focused message.
Which brings me to Quarentine Circular, as
well as Subsurface circular, these two-hour
narrative expereinces are defined by the fact
that they both contain circles.
Yeah.
Weird choice on that one.
In actuallity, they’re games that explore
high-concept scifi ideas in little isolated
packages, letting you play with the ethical
quandaries involved, challenge your preconceptions
and feel like you’re in the good 10% of
star trek episodes.
These games, mostly for budgetary reasons,
don’t actually have that much in the way
of branching choices or big flashing cutscenes,
they’re pretty much just people talking,
but that didn’t make the choices I had to
make any less important feeling, in many ways
it’s this minimalism that allows the game
to focus purely on morality and ethics.
It’s stuff like the shifting perspectives
and unanswered questions that added depth
to those choices, not clunky feedback loops
or arbitrary-feeling rewards.
With no combat, statistics or any real challenge
at all to get in the way, the only motivating
factor behind your decisions is whatever you
think the right thing to do is.
Outside of videogames there are no story routes,
no statistics, no chaos meters or morality
bars, there’s just decisions that have to
be made, and the consequences of them.
WHich really does beg the question of why
we include them in the first place.
When I made the choice to set Gabriel free,
or picked a side in intergalactic politics,
there was no incentive to do so other than
what I thought was the best option and that’s
what made the fallout from those decisions
so engaging.
We need a rethink about how we tackle moral
decision making in games, it’s something
that doesn’t need simulating, because it’s
something humans do naturally, so when we
try, all that rhappens is that we corrupt
that process.
Present players with interesting scenarios,
let the consequences unfold naturally and
they will do the rest.
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