The Balance of Good and Evil

I don't usually play games as an "evil" character.  My natural inclanation is to save people, heal others, and generally be a "do-gooder."  Games like Fallout 3, Bioshock, Fable, and inFAMOUS have greatly featured the morality/Karma/whatever system that can affect gameplay in subtle ways (slight differences in dialogue), to extreme ways (effects powers).  So it should be no surprise that my first playthrough on games like these is that of the good guy (with the exception of Fallout: New Vegas, on which it was difficult to determine the "good guy" path, and I instead treaded into the murky waters of the unknown - and also Fallout 3: The Pitt DLC, which had the same outcome).

Playing inFAMOUS on Evil (and on Hard mode, for trophy's sake) has actually been a bit more fun than my first playthrough.  I can't tell if it's because I'm now more comfortable with the game, or if the evil missions are more enjoyable, or if I truly have molded into a sadistic creep who enjoys zapping pedestrians with electricity before sucking their bio-energy out of their skulls to replenish my health. 

So today, I wanted to look at the ways in which games communicated good and evil, and my take on that dichotomy.  More after the jump...

Making Decisions
Games with dichotomies of good and evil are somewhat implicitily non-linear.  If the decisions you make effects the character you are, that should change the story.  The least of this appears in a game like Bioshock which is pretty damn linear.  However, your choices (to save the Little Sister or iveserate them by harvesting their ADAM-rich slugs) do have an impact on gameplay and some dialogue (most particularly, the ending).  Whereas the Dragon Age series fully embraces the non-linearity of decision making. 

The problem, especially for games hoping to become franchises, is that creating a diverse non-linear story limits your ability to have canon for future stories.  Dragon Age II blended this nicely by being able to import your previous save game or select a pre-rendered history at the start of the game.

Players seem to flock to games with decisions like these, so developers are interested in looking at the notion of choices in video games.  But I worry that it may be overwrought.  One beef I have with inFAMOUS, for example is that there is no benefit for sitting on the fence.  The game encourages you to be strictly good or evil, when in reality you may wish to play a character that helps others, but will do what it takes to survive...

The Art of Subtley
Unfortunately, for too many games with choices, they are too stark to be considered remotely realistic.  If I can make the snap judgement on a decision to save a person's life or let them die, but it takes me nearly an hour to name my recently caught Pokemon, that's saying something (possibly that I have no life).

Bethesda does a good job with morality subtlety, with Fallout: New Vegas shining moreso here.  Especially with the introduction of factions, a substanitally different spin on good and evil; the notion of factions is that good and evil are in the eye of the beholder.  Helping enslave innocent people is bad, but in Fallout 3: The Pitt DLC there was certainly a deeper look at the issue.  Enslavement was seen as the only way to rebuild.  I played this DLC with the full intention of being the good guy, freeing the slaves, and stealing the cure to their disease from the slavers.  But when I was confronted with the truth, and that to get the cure I'd have to kill a child, I hesitated and switched sides.  I think it's nice when video games can do that: make us think.

Seeing Change
Since I somehwat gave it some wags of the finger earlier, let me give a big nod to inFAMOUS that it deserves: as your Karma is impacted by your decisions, so is your appearance (and more interestingly) the appearance of the world around you.  Having changes feel palpable - and, in fact, dramatic! - should be a goal of any developer making a game with a Karma based system.  If you help people out, they start to rebuild and fix up the world around them (and around you); whereas if you fry them to bits, the place becomes more and more dilapidated. 

In short, I enjoy the creation and implementation of systems with good/evil choices, but I yearn to see more subtlety, and greater impact of the decisions made.  Also, if the story is appropriate, developers should consider moving away from a dichotomy and ponder a trichotomy or even polychotomy (yes, they are real words), to really let the player live in the world they have created.