Today I pulled off one of the more evil acts I have ever done in a game today. Not some random event of blowing up a planet or slaughtering a group of innocent civlians with a bad-ass weapon, this time it got personal.


A journalist I follow more than any other (Anthony) has been talking alot about about morality and the amazing situations a game that is (or attempts to be) non-linear can present to a player and what I did this morning made me get off my ass and actually write about something.

So I was playing InFamous earlier, my second playthrough, on Hard and this time I'm setting out to be one evil whore. See I had already gotten about halfway through the game on Hard and being evil when a friend told me I did not follow the correct protocol to set the difficulty and if I finished with that save I would not get squat for my efforts.

I really was just doing the bare minimum to be bad that time but this time around I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder about having to restart so I vented via ripping Empire City a new one.


On my way to missions I would punch everyone in my way just 'cus. Now this behavior fits more into the "being a total dick" catagory but It culminated in the torture of a poor woman that had just lost her family out of the docks of the Neon District.

I walked out to the start of a Evil side mission and was met with a 20-something woman with tattered clothes and looked like she'd been through hell since the blast. She looked Cole, a superhuman Conduit with thousands of volts of power running through his vains, in the eye and accused him of killing her family and screamed "You will pay!"

Previously when I had done this mission I just punted her off the dock due to the fact that she throws rocks at you and is a distraction while you deal with the police officer ambush that is waiting right around the corner to rip you a new one. This time I knocked the her down and put binds on her hands and feet so she would stay alive long enough to watch me slaughter the ambushers in front of her face. Then when everyone lay dead or dying I went back to the restrained woman, who had done nothing wrong because in her mind she was doing the right thing in trying to stop this psychotic maniac that has been murdering innocent people in cold blood, and drained every last bit of life out of her body then threw the body into the harbor.

Of course from a gameplay perspective I just Arc Restrainted a civilian and killed some policeman then drained her to regain my health then force-pushed her body into the water. But while I was doing this I considered how this would look to a person who knew nothing about the game was was watching this for the first time.

Like Anthony and many others have said before, InFamous attempts to give good moral choices but falls short of the mark mainly due to the fact that all the choices are black and white, I am happy to show that the game actually succeeded in making at least one person repulsed by his actions. Hell I sat and thought about what I did for a second and quit out of the game for a while.

While it is supposed to be a evil mission from the start it still has a moral choice in it that may not be recognised by the game itself but it can be by the player, There are interesting moral choices everywhere in gaming nowadays.

It's a pity (or not depending on how you look at it) 90% of them are totally by accident or only triggered if the player themself makes it happen.