Video Games and Moral Choices

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Episode Eight in my series of video "lectures," co-written with game designer James Portnow. It's time for another Game Design Corner episode, where we look specifically at elements of game design. I can be reached at floydo_animation at yahoo dot com. You can reach James at jportnow at gmail dot com.


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Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• video
• games
• moral
• choice
• presentation
• lecture
• daniel
• floyd
• james
• portnow
• game
• design
• good
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• morality
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[arahman56]

Well, Dragon Age used the "Character Approval"system instead of morality... but then Morrigan happened.

[AnkhOmega]

There actually is a good example of a difficult moral choice (kinda) in Neir, one of the endings allows you to save your daughter and a fellow party member who is turning into a monster. But the cost of doing so is to "Erase yourself from history", it deletes all of your save files and your progress. And if you look at how hard it is to get a 100% completion in that game....to lose it all can be a tough decision.

[Blahhikablah]

@ES21007 Yeah I was makign that comment on the iphone app, part of what I said got cut off. I was going to finish saying that it was nearly impossible to get the perfect, because you'd need to raise an entire kingdoms worth of funds on your own. Which was much harder to do than anything else in the game. (Unless you farmed minigames XD)

[ES21007]

@Blahhikablah

And it's not impossible to be perfect. All it takes is real estate planning from the beginning of the game.

[AndsGallego]

@Skydance1110 in deus ex is not to hard to decide even in the final of the game.

[TheLarhf]

@Blahhikablah Fable 3 wasn't out when this video got released.

[TheLarhf]

@Skydance1110 DA2 was bad in my opinion, Deus Ex: Human Revolution was absolutely brilliant, but not released at the time of this video's release. Human Revolution's end has one of the best, but kind of contrived, moral endings ever.

[Blahhikablah]

What about Fable 3? You had basically four choices, complete monster(turn your nation into a horrid place and steal the money for your own enjoyment and letting everyone die to the final boss), hated by those you saved(doing the same thing but not taking the money for your own enjoyment and noone dies to the final boss), kind hearted but hated anyway(making the land into a paradise and then having everyone die to the final boss and everyone hating you anyway), and then the near impossible, perf

[TheFirstWheel]

why is this video so hidden!?

[JustAnotherHumanist]

@SamuraiSammich I think you're missing the fact that tying your moral choice to how much stuff you get isn't the best way to develop meaningful and hard to make choices. He's not suggesting that we should make it hard to make the right choice by pitting greed against you, he's suggesting we make the choice difficult by making things morally ambiguous.

[SamuraiSammich]

@SamuraiSammich My bad, I meant ADAM. Herp a derp.

[SamuraiSammich]

There's something here I don't understand. In another episode, you faulted Bioshock for tying its choice system into one of its core game mechanics (the amount of EVE you receive, if I guessed correctly). But now you say that games should make it harder to make the right choice, which is what Bioshock did by not letting you have as much EVE if you saved the little girl than if you just harvested and killed her. Did I miss something?