Editor's note: Choice in games has often been nothing more than a binary decision -- should you be totally good or totally evil? -- meaning that gamers are always looking back, wondering if the other choice was the better one. Cosmo takes a look a new trend emerging in games like Dragon Age that focuses on the gray area in between the two extremes -- the place where most of us actually live our lives. -Brett

In most games, trying to keep your character a good guy is difficult, to say the least. When offered two different alternatives -- good or evil? -- the harder of the two is usually the virtuous choice. To better illustrate my point, I offer two examples: Metal Gear Solid and BioShock.

There's a sequence in Metal Gear Solid where Snake is captured and subsequently tortured. During the torture sequence, the game offers players the choice to either (a) endure the torture and ensure that Meryl (a sassy red-head*) is kept alive, or (b) submit to the torture, keeping Snake from serious harm but sacrificing Meryl (red-headed step-child**).

If players chooses option (a), they must endure a difficult mini-game, pounding the circle button as quickly as possible until their own thumbs feel tortured. It's not easy, but the end result is obviously the good-guy approach to that portion of the game.

A more recent example that comes to mind is BioShock. Should you harvest or rescue the Little Sisters? The easy choice is to harvest those freaky devil-kids, netting you more ADAM and allowing you to upgrade your character at a faster pace. But if you save the adorable angel-children, you get the good-guy ending (which, for the record, was lame -- but that's neither here nor there).

Rescuing the Little Sisters makes the game more difficult since you don't get the initial boost of ADAM for upgrades, but I did it anyway. And it paid off: I finished the game satisfied that I sacrificed my own ease of play in order to do the "right" thing.

These two choices remind me of a great poem by Robert Frost called "The Road Not Taken." It's about (surprise, surprise) choosing the path less trodden.

The first part reads:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood

Then, later in the poem:

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

Basically, Frost is saying that although he wants to try both paths, he knows that things will happen along the way that will prevent him from ever returning to the beginning and trying the alternate path. In other words, you can't redo the choices you make. It's deep, and you can take what Frost says and apply it to many facets of your own life, including games.

When I choose the good-guy path in games, I try and stick with it. The game I'm currently playing, Dragon Age: Origins, allows players to make many decisions, but there's definitely room to move from one path to the next. But, like in Frost's poem, I probably won't be going back to the beginning. I've already traveled far, and each decision I've made has had an impact on various parts of the game. And even if I do decide to start over, I won't be making the exact same decisions because my beginning path will be different.

I don't mean for this to sound complicated, so let me get to the point. Dragon Age: Origins doesn't have the best graphics or the flashiest effects, it's full of glitches and bugs, some lines of dialogue are missing the accompanying voice-over, and I've even had the game crash. But despite all of this, I think there's something to be said about the game design as a whole. It's brilliant.

Whether I decide to play the good or bad guy, at any point I can make a decision that doesn't classify my character as either. It's simply a choice I make on the road I've taken. And to me, there's nothing more satisfying. Metal Gear Solid and BioShock both have great critical choices for the player to make, but, as Dragon Age has proven, there's the potential for games to do so much more.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

*How I justified saving her.

**How I justified letting her die.