Y'know, sometimes it's just impossible to find a picture that depicts what you're talking about in an article. In an abstract way, I guess this picture fits well. Over Spring break, I had to read My Lai: A History with Documents. If you know anything about the incident, it isn't exactly our proudest moment as a military power. It brought to mind though, thoughts about games like Battlefield Vietnam and the Rainbow Six series. Now, what if a game actually put you in a position where you had to make a moral choice like the soldiers at My Lai did?
This week, I'd like to address the idea of moral choices in games. A while back, RevAnthony did a piece on all this, and in some respects, I'll be building off of his generalities, as I plan to deal with some specific cases. So, I suggest giving his article a read when you get the chance.
Alright, so let's jump back to Vietnam. In a game, say you start off by being put into a new company. As you play through the game, you have to deal with landmines, hit and run attacks, and uncooperative villagers. Essentially, the game is trying to agitate you. Now, one of your missions is to rout out enemies from a traditionally VC-friendly village. Before the mission starts, you commander reminds you of all the poeple in the company that have died. Once your chopper lands, there is no immediate resistance (which is rather odd), and so the landing zone is easily secured. As you go through the village, you hear gunfire coming from other areas, but are only encountering old men, women, and small children. RememberL any of them could be an enemy. The kids could walk up to your jeep and drop grenades in. Would you gun them down just to be safe?
Later on, you're guarding about 80 villagers that have been rounded up. Your commander comes by and orders you to waste them all. What do you do?
This doesn't necessarily have an impact on your gameplay, but it does present you with a moral choice, and puts you in the mindset of the soldiers who experienced this. Now, I realize that these games would probably do poorly with the mass market, since you're putting them through a game where they are actually experiencing what it was like in Vietnam, not just getting to go around, guns ablazing. Of course I could be wrong, and the mass audience would love this sort of game; but for now let's put it under the category of "games as art."
For another example, here's a game whose gameplay revolves around your decisions. Take something like Front Mission 4, where the setting is in international politics. Now, have the player as a leader of a country, where they have to make diplomatic decisions as to what to do in a wartime setting. When I was thinking up this example, the big thing that comes to mind is post-WWII US. Having the player make decisions about containment polcy in Europe and East and South Asia allows for a myraid of possibilities in how the game turns out.
Now, the second option really doesn't sound like a full game, and more like a history simulator. So then imagine combining the two examples, where you get to experience the reprecussions of your actions on the frontline. Providing the player with both an experience of a situation at both the micro and macro level would create an interesting perspective on what their actions do.
What I'm trying to get at here is that there's this really nice avenue where a genre can be completely turned on its head and provide for something that's truly innovative. Normally, FPS games are all about the wanton killing of anything that isn't on your side. Add in what I've described above, and it actually gives the story mode some meaning, as opposed to just acting as a training mode for multiplayer.
Actually seeing this game made, and even finding out the results of how people acted in situations really fascinates me. Would you enjoy seeing these sort of moral choices placed into games? Or am I just rambling on about something that'd utterly kill the gameplay for you?
Also, I really do recommend picking up the My Lai book, as it does a great job of telling the story of what happened, almost completely through the soldiers' own words.
Contest:
10:05 PM on 03.18.2007
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Interesting write up, DMV.
Its not that I wouldn't like to see moral choices have an actual effect in gameplay, its just that I don't think its ever going to happen. Choices we do make in games will be determined by the rewards or detriments presented by the game for making that choice.
I recently picked up my copy of Star Wars KOTOR and began a new game. You know the deal: light or dark side of the force. I played through it light before, so I wanted to try and be the evil douche. Let me tell you, it was a hard thing to do (well, for me anyway)! Choices like being nice to the apartment manager or giving away your hard earned cash to someone in need did effect your gameplay and did involve a large moral component.
The game sounds like a great idea. I think it would be difficult for some people to swallow a custom ending based on their own in-game choices (moral decisions).
This game also brings to light the bigger picture, something we often miss. After all, killing one civilian may lead to thousands of causalities on the other side!
So without consequences, having moral decisions in games is close to pointless.
In my pen and paper RPG days, I was infamous for doing this to my players. They'd carefully lay their ambush to kill a group of orcs, spring the trap and begin slaughtering...and in the middle of the action one or two of the players would realize that the orcs weren't fighting back, nor even attempting to. Afterwards they'd find women and children amongst the slain.
The truth of the matter is that armed conflict is a bloddy, nasty, brutal affair. Even using 'pinpoint precise' weapons, lots and lots of innocent people die in horrific ways. Strategically, a war can seem clearly in the moral right. Tactically, it's always a lot more ambiguous.
And My Lai is a pretty important case study for military types. Also look at the Milgram experiments; there's a lot of fodder there to be pulled apart. Would they make for a 'fun' game? No. Would they make for an important game? Maybe.
A My Lai game would be terrifying, and horrible, and not at all fun, which is the exact type of game I want to play.
I tried to play all DS, and just couldn't do it...
Despite all the corporate crap and their desire to please the masses, a genuinely emotive and well crafted game focused on this idea would be bound to sell. Vietnam would be an excellent setting; why not play a fully-fledged campaign from the NVA's perspective? Personally a shooter set on the Eastern front in WW2 - seen from both sides - would rock, as beaucoup crap went down there that has been largely ignored in gaming (shooters)...Soz for big post...
Seriously, David Jaffe's cancelled PSP "crying" game could have been very much what you're describing. It dealt with the invasion of American by the Chinese, and as an solider you would have to deal with moral choices such as deciding whether or not to obey your orders to kill a Chinese-American family suspected of collaborating with the enemy, and so forth. After hearing about the concept, I was really bummed that Sony didn't go forward with. That kinda thing might have convinced me to pick up a PSP.
It also had the effect of making me realize that I just did in a virtual world the kind of thing that I would rail against governments doing in the real world. I also thought it was really cool that a situation like this could develop in a game like Civ, where I think things like resources are decided randomly at the beginning of game.
It's 100% lag-free multiplayer and features 6 billion active users.
First place: the biosphere ends.
Second place: this set of steak knives.
Should the player be punished for massacring the villagers, or is that a morally neutral action? Different moral theories would have different things to say about that (for example, ethical egoism is going to advocate the massacre as an action that directly preserves or benefits the player), which means that different players will have different expectations for certain choices. There are obviously actions that most or all moral theories agree on, but the really interesting gameplay comes from those fringe cases where the line is a little more blurry.
Then again, I'm a complete maniac in games like <i>Grand Theft Auto</i>, perhaps because the consequences are hardly consequences at all, whereas in <i>Hitman</i> you're ranked by your performance in the mission. Or perhaps because I feel far removed, even detached from the character I'm playing. Indeed, the camera is fairly distant, and everyone looks very small. It almost adds to the 'God complex', where the game world is your sandbox and even dying won't set you back very far.
Shooters could ostensibly do it with so much more dramatic impact as well, since everything is done from first-person.
Unless the moral system was implemented perfectly, I can imagine a huge backlash among the public against such types of games. If there was a game where you could kill little children, and a news outlet got a hold of a video of some kid who enjoyed doing it, it would be hell on earth for the company that made it. It's too much of a risk, and it would put the entire gaming industry under scrutiny.
I had to reasrch this event in a "law of war" class. Just horrible.
But moral choices have been around since Ultima IV. Stuff like My Lai isn't marketable, so we're not going to see a to-massacre-or-not-to-massacre game anytime soon. But moral choice is there nonetheless.
Except a lot of gamers now (most?) are over 20 and are ready (desperate really) for some content that goes beyond talking foxes and zombies. A lot of younger players are also sophisticated in their movie viewing (yes, even some 14 year-olds) and it's not a stretch to imagine they would like to see similar themes applied to their video games.
This is true.
But it's a battle that is going to have to be fought sooner or later. The industry and its users are going to have to decide that they are going to act on behalf of content that is controversial. Everyone talks about gaming "growing up," but gaming is not some monolith that exists in some golden abstract realm. It's gamers telling the game companies what to produce. Period.
Sex and violence are easy. Easy to attack and easy to defend really. The real challenge will come when game developers try to sell games that deal with controversial IDEAS. Gamers will demonstrate their maturity or lack in their decision to defend or abandon freedom of expression in video games.
I'm not talking about Kratos grabbing titties or low-rez Hot Coffee humping. I'm talking about Do The Right Thing or Glengarry GlenRoss. Something with real teeth. Racial, social, political.
My Lai was not a shoot-em-up. To deal with that subject in a game would require a level of sophistication not yet exhibited in any video game I have seen or heard of.
If all we saw were B-movies, who the hell would take film seriously?
Hopefully all the fuss generated would lead to a proper debate. Any of the writers here could dismantle the - "OMFG! kids killing virtual kids then telling other kids how much fun killing kids is..." - debate that's sure to arise, anyway I digress...
In Fable, even the smallest actions add to your good or bad factor. There's a good choice and a bad choice and every 'decision' is a obvious as to it's moral value, providing you remove all context of the situation (I'm pretty sure I got evil points for putting a permanent end to a man responsible for the slaughter and torture of countless innocents). No one in real life watches over you every second saying "Naughty naughty, you killed an innocent little birdie. You're gettin' horns for that." This is the kind of stuff we see in most games. Good guys aren't as powerful but they have the love and adoration of everyone around them while bad guys are lonely (or misunderstoond) beings of ultimate destruction. NPCs are generic and cannot act, but only react.
I'm recently replaying Morrowind and I've noticed the game includes a lot of moral and ethical issues that the world has seen at some point in time. Slavery, drug trafficing, use, and addiction, culture clashes (ie: empire expansion), religious clashes. Do you run about freeing as many slaves as possible, or do you respect the time-honored tradition of a culture? Is the man who killed a corrupt politician a stain on justice that needs to be removed, or did he do the right thing?
It's the first game I've personally played (extensively) that really portrayed a REAL world. With cultures and issues that coexist. I want to see more games that involve REAL issues, regardless of whether these issues exist in is real or fabricated worlds.
Holy crap that was long-winded. I swear I didn't intend it to be.