I picked up inFamous, which is a great game. Really. You should play it. Anyone reading this has probably read a million reviews about it and/or has played it themselves, so I'm not going to belabor the point. However inFamous is a great excuse to talk about something a little more abstract: morality in games.

There seem to be two schools of thought on how the player's choices impact them throughout the game. inFamous follows the same path as Fable, Fable 2, Spider-Man Web of Shadows, Knights of the Old Republic, and many others. I call this the pendulum method. Good and Evil are real, absolute qualities in your character and where you fall on the spectrum can be calculated mathematically. This is a very Aristotelian method of determining ethics. If we reduce a person's merit to the net gain or loss of their actions Jenny McCarthy is a worse person than Charles Manson, and the Octo-mom is a better person than most everyone else.

I believe that good and evil are useless terms, and that only consequence matters. Let's call this a moderated version of Nietzsche's ethics. To my knowledge the only developer that attempts to achieve this world view is Bethesda. Games like Oblivion and Fallout have karmic meters, to be sure, but they don't really dwell on them. If you blow up Megaton it's gone and you're left to associate with scoundrels (or should I say Atlantians?). If you do not you are left with honest, hardworking and mostly-virtuous people (Athenians, for metaphor's sake). Perhaps your motives for destroying the town were based on reason. Surely living around an active atomic bomb is hazardous to the health of everyone in the DC metro, and disposing of it would help the most people with the most speed. That would make you less ‘evil,' but the consequences remain the same. Of course the Megaton example isn't perfect, but we've all played games where doing the ‘evil' thing would actually be the greater ‘good.'

So why don't more developers try to emulate Bethesda's approach? Some may actually see the world in absolutes, but I think it's mostly because they approach morality as an additional feature and the effort it would take to craft a world with morality as we understand it would take too much effort. If your character's moral standing is a number between one and ten it becomes far easier to unlock content based on actions. To a developer a phrase like "If Action Man is 5 evil, Sheriff is hostile" is easier to program than "If Action Man killed Little Girl, Sheriff is suspicious." That's not to say developers are lazy. Most of them have time and budget constraints that limit the amount of effort they can put into any aspect of their game. As Bethesda moves more into the realm of publishing I hope they maintain their willingness to treat morality as a core game mechanic and not an additional feature.