Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer recently pointed readers to the Versus CluClu Land blog run by Iroquois Pliskin (Metal Gear?!). Both of these authors write intelligent pieces about videogames—something I used to do often but have slowed down on while doing game studies in grad school and juggling all sorts of other outside projects. Every so often I read a post that sparks me to respond and I wanted to share one of those with you today.

Iroquois Pliskin writes about moral rewards in games and points to an article from Patrick Klepek on the MTV Multiplayer blog in which he asks four game developers who they chose to kill in the Playboy X / Dwayne feud in Grand Theft Auto IV. *SPOILERS AHEAD*

Pliskin contemplates the meaning of rewarding certain choices and says attaching a reward "represented a failure of nerve on the part of the designers" in creating morally ambiguous situations. Pliskin also notes that walkthroughs can be used to help game players learn the outcomes of their decisions without having to take risks.  Go read the article and then read my response on the Versus CluClu Land blog or right here below:

The use of walkthrough to make moral/gameplay choices is a very poignant one. Toward the beginning of the game I looked at a guide to see what the result of my choice of to-kill or not-to-kill was going to be, though by the time I got to Playbox X / Dwayne I had stopped referencing outside material to make my own choices.

This observation raises a handful of questions. The first relates to the use of walkthrough. While walkthroughs are not cheating, they do lay outside of the game's gameplay/narrative structure that you laid out. It's extra-narrative and extra-mechanic in terms of the game's world, but has become an ever-increasingly important part of the game industry. After all, Rockstar gave Brady Games the material needed to have their strategy guide published the day the game came out. And game publishers are also aware of the tenacity of the game playing public and their quick GameFAQs submitting fingers. This begs the question of how many people actually look at these walkthroughs when it comes to making moral decisions. If it is indeed a lot, then something needs to be done to make these decisions more surprising and impactful.

Another question is revealed in terms of decision-reward structures. If you're not looking at a walkthrough and choose to kill Playboy X and are rewarded for doing so does this necessarily show a bias for the "right decision" in the game. I felt that Rockstar has set up that bias in terms of narrative already. It's really hard to empathize with Playboy X. He lives outside the way of life with which Niko has aligned. The heavy-handed narrative from Rockstar seems to imply that getting Playboy X's apartment shouldn't be considered a reward so much a not getting it is punishment. This of course may just be my reading of the game, but I felt that the designers had a general trajectory for Niko's character even though it was "open" on the surface.

People get down on Grand Theft Auto in this area because they expect "open world," whereas I've found that the GTA games are anything but. Grand Theft Auto games allow freedom on one axis of your gameplay/narrative structure, but the latter is much more finely controlled. Sure CJ can fly around on a jetpack to the top of Las Venturas buildings and snipe people from the roof, but that open play will not progress the game, as you've written. It's up to the designers to strike the balance of what moves the game forward.

So what do we do about this climate of decisions affecting gameplay. Should all games look like Knights of the Old Republic with an alignment system that changes the narrative? Does a different-but-equal reward system mitigate the inherent problems with moral decisions in narrative? What about randomly or procedurally generating results so that everybody's gameplay experience is slightly different? Or is it okay to reward decisions based on the ideology of the game?

What's most important is that game designers try all these different things so that we continue to have a wide variety of game playing experiences.