Author's Note: This article contains end-game spoilers for Fallout 3, and some minor end-game spoilers for Grand Theft Auto IV.  If you haven't yet finished these games, you've been warned!

If you’ve played an RPG in the past decade or so, then you’ve surely been exposed to that whole “morality” thing.  The driving force behind this is the claim to greater realism.  After all, by mimicking the moral dilemmas so many of us face in real life on a daily basis (whether or not to help someone at our own personal expense, whether to bang the sexy alien or develop a more meaningful relationship with the churchy human chick, whether to save the galaxy or conquer it, etc) we can connect more intimately with our games.

Unfortunately, videogames are still a long way off from their dream of greater realism through the addition of morality systems.  What many developers either haven’t realized yet or are trying to ignore is that tacking on a morality mechanic to a game is just that – a tacked on mechanic.  As a result, what is supposed to add a heightened level of immersion and realism ends up looking even more “video-gamey” due to in-game morality that betrays itself as being illusory, arbitrary, and artificial.

Morality is complicated.  Our moral canvasses are painted with all sorts of shades of gray, yet when transposed into videogames what we get is a very simplified black and white version of things.  In most games morality takes the form of the classic “good vs evil” dichotomy – paragon/renegade, light side/dark side, etc.  The fact is games just aren’t good at capturing the nuances of our moral dilemmas.  Oftentimes we can either choose to help someone for the “good” option, or choose not to help, or to personally gain from the situation for the “bad” option.

In a game like Fallout 3 this seems silly.  The Wasteland is a desolate place that dictates survival above all else.  The harsh, irradiated world of Fallout 3 does not even take our standard notions of morality into account.  It is not an immoral world, but an amoral one, and to choose to threaten your own survival in the name of aiding complete strangers is so contrary to that logic it breaks the realism of the game and is actually counter-immersive – we’re immediately reminded that we’re playing a game, and that we must choose either the “good” or the “bad” choice for our character.

Similarly, in the Knights of the Old Republic games, there is a clear line drawn between good and evil as represented by the light and dark sides of the Force.   BioWare decided to use dialogue options to represent different morality alignments; the “light side” options are polite responses that sound like recitations of Emily Post, and the “dark side” options effectively have your avatar sounding like the world’s biggest douchebag.  While BioWare should be commended for their attempt at a pervasive character morality system, the arbitrary decision to make all Jedi personality-less drones and all Sith assholes ends up seeming silly and cliche, and fails to capture the nuance of an in-depth system of morality.

The final missions of Fallout 3 see you destroying the Enclave’s base and killing their president (he’s a computer, don’t worry), and then going on to helping the Brotherhood of Steel claim an important piece of technology.  This last moment centers on an important moral choice – do you activate the technology yourself, leading to your death, or send your new Brotherhood buddy to do it for you, killing her in the process?

Unfortunately, through either the limits of the videogame medium or a shortfall in Bethesda’s writing team (and I’m inclined to go with the former on this one) the impact of this Grand Decision fell flat for me.  After all, I had no real choice.  I couldn’t, for example, round up a wasteland raider or captured Enclave prisoner and force them to turn on the machine.  Nor could I choose not to choose, and walk away leaving them to solve their own damn mess.  In fact – there are literally infinite numbers of things I could do, but the game restricts me to 2 – flipping the switch and dying, or drafting Lyons to do my dirty work and living.  In a game of supposedly limitless choice, the only real choices I had were the ones Bethesda wanted me to make; my own sense of morality I had established for my character was irrelevant, since in the end I was restricted to their stock “good” and “evil” choices anyways.

The more choice players are given in a game, the harder it is for the devleopers to tell any sort of cohesive story.  Ultimately, at the end of the game your character still needs to save the princess and defeat the great evil, regardless if he spent all his time up to that point helping old ladies cross the street, or mugging them.  Since developers can’t let players make any choices that would seriously derail the story they’re trying to tell, this means that moral decisions are often relegated to simply the dialogue options that you choose.

This points to a huge disconnect between the story being told by the developers and the story that I’m creating as a player, and here is where the notion of a morality system falls apart.  A game like Mass Effect is an action game, meaning that a large percentage of the gameplay is spent, for better or worse, killing things.  This mechanic is the core of the gameplay and obviously can’t change based on whether your Shepard is an angel or a demon.  With this in mind, it seems ludicrous to bestow “paragon” status to one character and “renegade” to another, even though they’re both, by even the most conservative of standards, mass murderers.    

This lends itself to an almost nihilistic interpretation – your actions will be the same, regardless of what dialogue options you chose.  Thus the developers’ attempt to insert moral poignancy into games has the opposite effect – once the realization dawns that the game remains largely unchanged, there ceases to be any personal moral impact at all, and your morality slider just becomes another kind of “score” to keep track of.  Instead of breaking free of the notion that you’re playing “just another video game”, this emphasizes it.

I’m not saying that including morality in videogames is impossible, and that we should go back to playing mindless killfests.  It’s these attempts to give games a moral compass that propels them further down the road to an Art form.  While I don’t think that in its current state moral options in games are capable of overcoming the narrative/gameplay divide, I don’t think this is a failure inherent to the medium.  One option is for developers to stop literally tracking our morality on a chart and simply naturalize these moral dilemmas into the core gameplay.  Games should be a tool for exploring our own morality, not merely a canvas for the developers to express theirs’.  Let us draw our own conclusions and be our own critics about our own moral decisions.  While I may not be a developer, I do know that what kept me up at night after executing Darko Brevic wasn’t any in-game consequence, it was a real-life pang of guilt.

Originally published on Pixels or Death.