Interesting points made there. I think one moral system that DOSNT work is the karma system in Fallout 3. Opening the wrong door or picking up an object that belongs to someone else is automatic bad karma. And you can turn your karma around really easily buy giving water to the bum outside megaton.

so much smarm. whats with all the smarm ?

You make some good points. But in addition to that I would like to see more choices. Normally there is one good and one bad and one neutral. They could expand on that, say, in the way that Dungeons and Dragons does. They could have a Lawful Good choice, Chaotic Good, Neutral, all the way to Chaotic Evil. Each having it's own costs and benefits.

Awww, your trimmed your lovely terrorist beard :(

Well I think infamous never claims to be a great moral choice game. Its pretty on or off with its morals and doesn't try to play it off like its some monumental thing.

I'm fine with it because the whole game treats its self like it is a video game, with the missions showing you how much experience and how much evil/good you did.

If it tried to hide the fact that its so binary then it would be a lot more annoying.

As it stands its a fun video game that doesn't lie to itself.

"Moral Choice" in games is one of the largest mistakes in game design, and it's a pity it's used so often now. Designers are so focused on making the protagonist in every game YOU, so they can advertise that YOU make choices with consequences, that affect the world. The disconnect between character and player is so discernible that any real choices you make are never hard choices, they're just methods of game progression, rather than measurable emotional choices.

Design instead needs to focus on creating endearing, real protagonists, that players can empathize with. When you do that, the designer can now make choices for the player, and then make the player play out that choice. Not only does that eliminate the development time of making every in-game action have multiple methods of completion, but ultimately provides a deeper, meaningful gameplay experience.

MOAR SISTER, LESS U

I remember playing through Jade Empire (such an awesome game) for the first time in which there is a moral system of sorts. It pretty much amounts to the same thing as Fable & KOTOR in that there is a "way of the open palm" (good) and "way of the closed fist"(evil). Although there is some pretty cool philosophy backing each way, it is sadly so dumbed down in the gameplay. Interestingly, the game made it really easy to change your alignment with each way. Which brings up two points about morality in games.

1) There needs to be a middle ground of some sort. Morality isn't black and white. There needs to be a level of complexity.

2) How easy should it be to change your "side"? If your evil, does one good deed make you good? Vice-versa for good.

Spelunky is the ultimate moral choice and is still to be my GOTY.

The biggest moral choice I recently faced in gaming was in UFC 2009 Undisputed - do I break the face of my opponent or do I let him get back up?

Before meaningful moral choices, I would appreciate a real (normal) choice to start off. As it stands almost all of those 'choices' are actually problems (i.e. they have an optimal solution).
At the moment I consider a moral system something that makes me run the game multiple times to see everything.
I wonder what's next. Religion maybe? At least that would be an enhancement to morality as it stands in games by granting benefits for choosing a side on the moral compass and giving tribute to a certain deity.
It would also fit in the 'total character customization' idea we see a lot.

I want a choice where there is no apparent difference in benefit and cost between the two. Something that would greatly change a part of the game that I could not begin to speculate on. Too bad that only works once though...

I was under the impression that if you saved all of the Little Sisters in Bioshock you actually ended up better off than if you harvested them all. You'd have more ADAM, and you have access to plasmids that you wouldn't have otherwise. From a morality in games standpoint, that is totally bunk.

As I see it, the problem with these games is that the moral choices are too explicit and gimmicky, and they have known consequences. No matter what the situation, realism and immersion isn't possible if the user knows exactly what his or her actions will result in.

It's even worse if these choices don't have consequences. I played fable 2 as an evil character because I couldn't stand the NPCs. Whenever anyone either said something rude to me or hit on me, I killed them on the spot. However, instead of running in fear at the sight of me, the NPCs then followed me around with hearts over their heads. Whether you are good or evil has nothing to do with how people treat you, other than the sound clips that play when you're around them.

A good implementation of moral choice for me would be Mei Ling in the Hitman series. She appears once in each game except Blood Money. In 1 and 3, she has information about the mission you're currently on. If you help her escape, she will give you the code to some safe. An easier solution, however, is shooting her in the face and taking the code off her body. This is a choice that is pertinent to the game, has real (albeit known) consequences, but most importantly, is implicit. There is no "Press X to save; Y to shoot in the face and laugh" message; the player must submit the heinous act as a valid shortcut.

In Hitman 2, she is chilling in this dudes castle and you can rescue her if you want.

Also, "karma", "paragon/renegade", etc. points are freaking annoying because player actions shouldn't be that shallow. (Unless there are Force powers around (go KotoR!))

Those are my thoughts.

Another problem is that most games reward moral extremism. I don't mean that the individual choices are extreme (though they usually are) but rather that extreme dedication to one moral alignment is often the best strategy. If you ALWAYS do the good thing, then by the end of the game you'll have crazy healing abilities and some holy spells. If you ALWAYS do the bad thing, then you'll get awesome offensive lightning magic. But if you do a little of both, then at the end of the game you end up being able to heal yourself for 10% of your life and cast level-1 fire. It's the worst of both worlds.

Do you generally use color key or chroma key when you do these? I would suggest chroma key if you don't already.

Yeah, the problem with most morality systems in games is that you are basically limited to either being Jesus or Snidely Whiplash, with almost no middle ground, and the only real way to be "neutral" is to alternate between picking the Jesus choices and the Snidely Whiplash choices, which is ridiculous.

Except for Fable/Fable II, where all you have to do is eat a bunch of Tofu or Crunchy Chicks to change your moral alignment.

I don't really want to delve too much into Philosophy(mainly, cuz I suck at it), but it seems too me that before we can make really deep moral choices between outright good and evil, we need to find a way to present the differences between good and lesser good(or evils, depending on the story).

For example, say your mission is to an alien mutant virus from taking over and escaping a space station. Instead of presenting the choice of doing your job or joining the aliens, maybe, present the choice of stopping the outbreak by locking down/evacuating the station and running a purge system or just blowing the whole thing up.

To an extent, this is what I liked about Mass Deff..er...Mass Effect. It wasn't really a choice between good or evil, but rather...how you conduct yourself. Do you show sympathy to those needing your help, or do you just do the task you were assigned and tell them to take care of it themselves.

I also felt that Bioshock was good in this way too the first time I played through it. It wasn't about saving or taking over Rapture. It was about trying to survive and escape, and the choice lied in if you tried to seek the aid of those there to help get out, or do you step on everyone else thinking only about yourself. Of course, the more the story went on, the less that feeling stayed(and the endings totally kill that feeling too).

Anyhow, I'm just rambling at this point, so I think I'll shut up now as long post is long.

Phoenix Wright Justice For All **SPOILERS**

The middle child of the Phoenix Wright DS trilogy has a really great "do the right thing and your partner dies" verses "do the wrong thing and an inconsequential person suffers, save your partner, preserve your record" moment at the end of it. the consequences are not played out in the narrative (it's the same path no matter which choice you make) but the call back to reflect on your decision does strike me as powerful case of a "Gotcha" morals check without a clear "good" or "evil" distinction.

I'm also with Stahlbrand. I always thought that the "evil" choice was the more attractive option. Especcially when you get bonuses to your force lightning and choke powers.

"I don't really like Bioshock anymore"

what's a matter? not INDIE enough for you? :P

anyway when I played Oblivion I was a good character for the most part (helping people and shit), but I would also try to steal people's stuff allot too, so I guess I was more in the gray zone in that game

video is borked for me too

Moral choices in games all tend to default to binary "good" vs "evil" choices, and more often than not, the consequences of these choices tend to be strictly cosmetic in nature: NPCs and the environment react differently to you, your appearance changes, you see a different version of the game spectacle when you choose. Not only that, but there generally seems to be more "payoff" when you are as good as can be or as bad as can be.

I think these things are all utter bull for pretty obvious reasons, but the single biggest misstep modern games make when attempting to introduce morality is that, well, you can't make a moral choice in a video game. You just can't. Regardless of how convincing a game looks or feels, you the player are separated utterly from the gameworld by the frame of the TV, the volume of the audio, the methods of input - there's an undeniable distance between the player and the player character. When you make a "moral" choice, you're acting upon a supposed, faked moral compass instead of your actual moral compass, because the consequences involved do not apply to YOU - they're only feedback, another part of the spectacle that rewards the player for playing. You play a certain way and you get a different number or different pretty colour to look at, maybe a different challenge or two. The game is harder or it isn't. The point is that the player is likely making a decision based on gameplay factors and not actual moral choices. There's no real moral choice system in games, only a branching path system. Calling it 'moral' is bullcrap. When you can just play the game again and choose the other path, all actual morality falls to pieces.

The only way you can make these choices genuinely compelling is by making these choices relevant to the fundamental rules of gameplay, and even then, you can make a statement about morality without having to involve choice. I think bioshock would have been a genuine game if you got no ADAM whatsoever for saving a little sister, ever. Being totally good would have required you to completely forego plasmids, thus drastically changing the game experience. And if you did just one little sister in because you knew you'd need it to survive, you'd get the bad ending and have to actually live (or die) with being a CHILD KILLER. I think Infamous could have been made more interesting if the population of the city began to react negatively to you regardless of your actions.

iunno, jus' sayin.

Sometimes moral choices get me so stuck. Like in FO3: the pitt. I can't decide whether to help the slaves or the slavers, basically because I found the baby and mother, listened to her, and it properly muddied the morals. I saved just before talking to the head of the Pitt, switched it off, and haven't played it since. What should I do? And why do I think it matters?

Good rant again. I really found the idea of making either the evil choice safe and the good choice more punishing (or the vice-versa) interesting, and wonder if it shows some of the game developers world view on right and wrong.

I think if developers continue to put moral choices in the game they need to complete remove any alignment bars and, as many have said, make the choices far more gray. That way, the player can decided for him or herself whether this is good or bad.

As for npc's reacting to the players escapades, I think one would almost have to give each NPC a sense of their own morality. You may not have thought what you did was evil, but the preacher from the church of megaton might not see it that way. Of course that's a daunting task, and the npc's morality could be just as a black & white. Almost moving the alignment bar from a menu screen to an in game representation.

This all being said, I think bluexy is really on to something by actually removing these moral choices and putting players into the role of a certain character, making them deal with the choices they make.