Moral Ambiguity in Game Design
I recently asked should monsters in Unangband be able to surrender to the player? This was driven primarily by the desire to see whether the act of surrendering itself was an interesting game mechanic – does having a monster throwing it’s hands in the air and giving up disrupt the player’s enjoyment of the game, or increase it?
But one response in the comments touched on the much more interesting area of the moral choices involved in allowing surrender – that is, if I implement monsters surrendering, I should be careful to include an alignment system that enforces the player’s actions towards the resulting prisoners of war. A simple approach would be killing surrendered monsters should tip the player towards evil, and letting them live should tip the player towards good. But the implication is that the player’s moral choices should be rewarded and enforced by a game mechanic.
And this, in my opinion, is a serious misstep in understanding how morality in games should work.
By implementing a moral choice as an in game mechanic, you rob the choice of real consequence. The player stops viewing this decision as ambiguous shades of grey that reflect on them as a person, and starts to min max the benefits of the decision according to the game rules. And they’ll usually adopt the position either explicitly or implicitly encouraged by the game designer (more correctly: the emergent advantageous position of the rules created by the game designer) regardless of whether that position correlates with their morals, or refutes them.
Take a complex moral choice I’ve written about before: the choice of delivering a coup de grace to a fallen enemy. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl there is no in game reason to do so: you are free to leave a fallen Stalker lying on the ground cursing and suffering. Whereas in Far Cry 2, the equivalent injured soldiers will always pull out a pistol and start shooting you – forcing you shoot back. Morally, the unpunished greys of S.T.A.L.K.E.R are far more interesting from the player’s perspective because there is a real choice involved.
You may argue that if there are no in game consequences, the choices are trivialized. But this misses the opportunity for the player to make a decision that is personally meaningful – that is, to play out the situation in whichever way resonates to them, or maybe creates dissonance. I am thinking of the term role-playing in its original sense – without consequences, you are free to adopt whatever persona makes sense to you at the time, guiding yourself by instinct instead of forethought. It is this specific reason of not wanting to consider consequence in the moment that there is such an emphasis on creating a safe environment when working with improvisation in theatre.
Being rewarded or punished for moral trespass is the kind of slippery slope of justification that people are innately comfortable with – the Stanford Prison experiment being the canonical example – and presenting morality in games should challenge the player’s assumptions, not reinforce them. In game consequences weakened the power of Bioshock’s Little Sister euthanasia, and the watered down choices of the ‘No Russian’ level in Modern Warfare 2 where anything outside of the boundaries of ’shoot civilians’ and ‘don’t shoot at all’ resulted in immediate game over. The greatest accomplishment of the Grand Theft Auto series of games is creating a sandbox without imposed moral judgement.
You are still free to recognize moral choice within the game – which is why roguelikes have modes like iron man, vows and challenge games – but these are self-imposed rather than built by the game designer, entitling the player to bragging rights and feeling of moral superiority if they succeed while working within these limits. The canonical metagame decision is, of course, difficulty level which does drastically alter the game play in a way that seems to contradict what I have argued moral decisions should do. But again, this is a player initiated decision, which very few games delivery judgement on (the Ninja Dog difficulty level in the later Ninja Gaiden’s being one notable exception). Plenty of game players will judge you, on the other hand, but that’s the consequence of playing games in the unsafe real world.
This post is from Ascii Dreams.
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