Morality, Opportunity, and Picking Sides: Choices in Video Games

The surge of "choice systems" in video games has had a rather significant resurgence in recent years.  Mostly, it seems like a way for a game developer to offer players a chance to customize their own game experience, make the story more unique to them.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  There have been a few games I've played where it felt a choice system was simply tacked on, others seem to have their entire game premise based around difficult choices.

Now, I'm not a video game scholar.  I haven't studied the history of video games, or interviewed developers, or anything like that, so all I can report on is my own impressions.  If I'm off, or wrong about something, I hope someone lets me know in the comments below.  I'm not looking to pick a fight, just express what I've experienced.

More after the cut.




To begin, I guess we should look back at the first video games I ever played that had huge choices in them.

The first that I can remember?

No, I'm not talking about which one to buy.  I bought -both-.

The moment you turned on Pokemon Red or Blue, you were presented with a choice for your original Pokemon.  You could start the game with Charmander, Bulbasaur, or Squirtle, your archnemesis would immediately choose the one that would be strong against you, and the game started.  Even when I was young, I didn't really look at this like a huge "game breaking" choice, I simply viewed it as "early game easy, medium, or hard mode."  Most of the first monsters you encounter are bug and plant Pokemon, so obviously having a creature on fire would make battles easy, having another plant would be an even fight, and having water would be difficult based on the "rock, paper, scissors" theme of the game.

The next games I encountered that had real choices that actually affected the game were the Japanese simulators I discussed earlier.  One sentence would get someone to like or dislike you, but getting one person's affection would mean others would assume you were taken, or would make them upset that you weren't focused on them.  You had to think about which character traits you liked, which ones you didn't, and if you weren't careful you could end the game alone.

Please excuse the art, it was the early 90s.

After those games in the 90s came a rather significant leap in time for games that presented me with genuine choices.  Sometimes an RPG would present me with a small choice that might affect a tiny bit of the story, but usually nothing earth-shattering would happen from it.  Sometimes a game might offer a decision that would only affect which interchangeable character became part of your team.  I vividly recall playing Chrono Cross for the Playstation and being amazed at the fact that going or not going somewhere might radically alter not just what characters I got to play with, but also change how other characters behaved around me.

I spent a lot of time pondering designing a game where several large choices made through the series would change not just who your teammates would be, but would perhaps even change who the villain of the series would be.  I'll put that into a later article.


Now, I never played Fable, and I managed to miss out on Knights of the Old Republic when it first came out (I was rather disillusioned by Star Wars video games at that point).  I didn't really experience a morality system until I first played Jade Empire.  And at that point, my mind was blown.

Hey, Bioware.  It's not a race with Valve to see who makes people give up first on getting the next part of the story.  Trust me, you've won.  Now just make the sequel, please.

This was the first game where I had to choose whether my character was "good" or "not as evil as the bad guy but still not good."  Choices made would fill up a meter indicating the path I was going down, which would lock or unlock other moral choices to be made along the way.  I tended to always go the most virtuous path in any game I played, because, well, I'm the hero, right?  It's the problem I've had with a lot of media where the main character isn't really a hero for the series.

Slight tangent:  For instance, it's the reason I could never really get behind the TV show Dexter.  I sat down, watched the first episode, and immediately wondered why I was supposed to root for the main character.  If the system doesn't manage to convict a murderer, I don't think I should be cheering for another murderer to "make things right."  I don't want to see a psychopath succeed, I want to see the system succeed so characters like that (even in a fictional sense) wouldn't need to exist.  It's the same reason I could never really get excited about series like Weeds or Breaking Bad or The Shield or even The Sopranos.  When I'd ask people I knew if the main characters were the "heroes" of their stories, I'd never really get a solid answer (except in the case of The Shield where the answer was "no.")  I could also never really get a solid answer when I'd ask "so why do I want them to win?"

Back on topic now.

So, I played Jade Empire, and thought "this system has potential."  And then along came the game that, if Jade Empire blew my mind, this one gathered up what was left and blew it up from orbit.

This game, followed soon after by Mass Effect which finalized the scorched earth treatment of my mind, really cemented in my mind what the "morality" system was meant to be.  It customized a game for people, so you could talk to your friends and see how they handled various situations and how they reacted to difficult choices.

But there was still that puzzle in my mind of "why wouldn't you want to take the truly good guy side?"  In Bioshock you could rescue or "harvest" little girls for energy that would help you use your powers.  I always rescued them because what kind of monster would I be if I didn't?  The Mass Effect series wasn't as clear, with difficult choices like setting free a creature that was once so populous it terrorized an entire star system, or providing a cure for a population controlling measure to a race that also once waged war on other species, but there was one big problem with the whole concept.

No matter what choice I made, even if it seemed foolish like "unleash a monster that once could have destroyed us all," I knew I wasn't radically altering the core idea behind the game.  I still knew who the bad guys were, I knew what the boss fights would entail.  Letting this creature go probably wasn't going to change the problems I faced, since there wouldn't be a stage called "hey, fix that problem you caused, mmkay?"   Or even if it did, it would be something the game would probably make sure I could handle when the time came.

Now, the big matter in the choice system was getting your crew mates and teammates to like you, which appealed to the part of me that once played dating sims, since I had to actually think about the other character's personality.  Of course, I was usually so high on the virtue side that even if I completely disagreed with the other character, I could still talk them into my point of view.  This allowed the characters to live through difficult experiences later, which made me happy because of how attached I became to them.

Other games I've come across also try to provide a "moral choice" system, but in a lot of them it simply feels tacked on, like a way to get "moral-specific" powers or equipment.  Sometimes the moral choice system seems completely irrelevant at the end of the game, as there's just one choice you have to make that decides everything, regardless of your previous actions.  Which, to be fair, can make a lot of sense.  If I wanted to play a "smart villain" I'd probably do everything I could to make the entire population of Gamelocationville, USA like me before I toppled the bad guy and then set myself up as the ultimate ruler of everything...but I can't really think of a game that's as clever as that.

So, if the only real thing that seems to matter in a "moral choice" system in the long run is how it affects the other characters, what happens when the entire game seems devoted to needing those connections just to stay alive?

I'm glad you asked.

This weekend, I've been playing The Walking Dead, and I really wish I had played this in 2012 so I could have made it my game of the year.  It doesn't have the same high-tense action as an FPS, or the complex plot of a lot of RPGs, but what it does right it gets perfectly right.  The atmosphere, the characters, the difficult choices, all are so perfectly positioned and timed that you find yourself holding your breath during even quiet moments.

Honestly, I can't tell you the last time I actually jumped in a game just because a wooden staircase creaked when I climbed up it.

Telltale Games (makers of a few of my other favorite games, like Strong Bad's Cool Game For Awesome People) got it right with this one.  When a character asks you a question and you lie, you better remember that lie you told or they'll call you out on it.  Depending on which characters you try to save during difficult moments, other characters might or might not show up to save you when you're in trouble, and a conversation held deep into a later chapter might be completely shaped by something you said back at the beginning of the game.  Characters that I want to keep on my side might take a strongly opposing point of view from how I'm playing my character, and when I have to decide between two people, both of which are key members of the team I'm helping to stay alive, it creates some genuine drama that tugs at my chest.

It's a game where there are no real "good or evil" choices so much as there are "optimist or survivalist" choices, you can just hope that the choices you make won't leave you alone against the hordes of the undead.

For the next five days, I'm going to be going through each episode of this game, explaining my choices and telling where the story went for me.  There will be major story spoilers along the way, but a lot of things that happen will be based on the specific choices I made, so even if you play the game on your own (and you really should), your own game experience will be very different.

So, what was the whole point of this article?

I guess, in a way, it's a comment that I enjoy when a game lets me shape my own story.  I just want the choices to actually matter in  terms of what happens, and not just be things that might or might not affect the plot in a way that doesn't help or hinder my game.  Mass Effect had a lot of great ideas, but until I get a game that gives me an actual good reason that being "as much of a good guy as I can" might not be the best choice, it really does feel like there's an entire second half of a game I'm not as interested in playing, which I guess means I miss out on the full content of what I just spent money on.

Maybe someone else can explain to me why they'd play as a bad guy, but when my options are "save your teammate" or "abandon them to catch a bad guy" ... well, I know which kind of character I'd want people to look up to.