I'm Feeling Lazy
So i'm going to copy paste my reply to Tylea002's blog here. Enjoy.
The concept of a moral choice within a computer game has always felt especially restrictive to me - People love to praise Mass Effect for the potential it offers to be good or evil - but arguably the most interesting choices can only be made if you already know which path you want to follow; Evil or Good. The neutral grey middle character was boring and often prevented you from finding out information or progressing fluently through the story. You basically had to pick at the beginning whether to be good or evil and then stick to that path throughout the entire experience to reap the benefits that particular element of the game had to offer. This meant your choices were already predetermined and the concept of Moral Choice, the freedom to make up you own decision was really just an illusion.
Bioshock's moral choices were interesting, but repetitive. If I killed the little girl before, why wouldn't I do it now? It was just making the same decision over and over again. You might have got a little bump of guilt each time, but for whatever reason you justified it at the beginning of the game - that reason is likely to exist throughout. There was no new information to alter your perspective. There was no individuality to each little sister, again removing the concept of reacting to an individual scenario.
If you look back over the games you have played you will find that in most cases to fully take advantage of a morality system you either go Good or Evil. In many cases you have no choice but to pick an extreme anyway. If you are playing a good character in Fable 2, why would you leave a town corrupt? These choices only really benefit you in their extremes.
On the flip-side you have GTA4 which manages to successfully involve moral choices, but the game only gives you bad choices to make. Often your decisions are punished with moral responsibility. For example passing on the opportunity to kill the Drug Dealer. The game is successful in that it removes the idea that the decision you make is wrong - but the consequences are still negative within the context of the game. No matter what decision you make the game will continue to progress regardless, but you will have to deal emotionally with the consequences as the player, via character empathy.
Then there is the train of thought - if your actions make no consequence to the world, what's the point of having them? Do you really want one action to change the entire future of a Town, as in Fable 2 - or do you want the super realism of GTA4 where your actions are only really meaningful to you, the player. I guess there is room for both, but I have yet to find an equilibrium in any game which feels fully satisfying.
Thanks For Reading. Real Blogs coming soon.
Love Sweep
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