It’s a universal human impulse – evil.
It’s extremely common, isn’t it? Douchebaggery, dickery, devilry? Especially in video games, where we are protected by the notion that “this isn’t real”, so not only do we get off scot-free, we also understand that to perform evil actions in real life would have real consequences – but not here.
Save in the middle of Whiterun and start firing arrows at guards? Push people out of a window as Commander Shephard? Condemn folk who maybe don’t deserve it in Dragon Age: Inquisition? Decide that innocent people stuck in a plague-infested prison aren’t actually as important as your medicine and bread for the day in Pathologic? Blow up cities in Just Cause?
But what is evil? And how should games represent evil? Do games have a right to say what evil actually is?
A lot of very famous games that deal with these ideas explain evil as a place on a slider. Knights of the Old Republic represents the Light Side and the Dark Side as a meter that you can “fill up / deplete”, with the top of the meter being “Good” and the bottom of the meter being “Evil”. The problem with such a system – well, there are multiple problems, in fact.
The first problem is that the developers like to incentivize playing the game one way or another. In Mass Effect, another BioWare game, you gain dialogue “boosts” depending on how high you’ve filled your meter. Some arguments in Mass Effect 2 between squadmates for instance cannot be resolved without alienating one of the squadmates, unless you have a high enough Paragon (good) or Renegade (bad) meter. A player is then incentivized to select only Paragon or Renegade options as the most optimal way of progressing through the game.
The second problem is that the developers thus have to code in a number of moral decisions or actions that the player can undertake which result in good or evil points to progress the meter one way or another. The problems contained within this are again twofold: first, the developer must decide on what constitutes a good action and an evil action. Second, the very fact that this is all so muddy is grounds for the developer to put in incredibly arbitrary good / evil decisions. Decisions like the one in inFamous: Second Son, where you catch up to a guy you’ve been trying to capture for ages. The game asks whether you want to spare his life and let him go free, or brutally murder him while his loved ones are in earshot. There’s no middle ground, no neutral “well I’m bringing you in” option. It’s either you are Mr. Lovely Nice Guy, or Mr. Extreme Evil Bastard.
The problem is complicated further when the meter isn’t just advanced through story decisions and finite dialogue options, but can be modified indefinitely by doing a large number of easy, repetitive actions. Fallout 3 was fairly rightly lambasted for allowing the player to stomp through the Wasteland doing all sorts of horrible things – helping slavers, blowing up entire towns, killing people for no reason – but then you can still have a good Karma rating because you stopped and gave a hobo lots of the water bottles you’ve been collecting during your time in the Wasteland.
But these evil decisions are more than a lot of games give you, even if the karma meter doesn’t capture any of the nuance of real life decisions. Linear story games rarely place you in the shoes of the villain, and you fight for the forces of good and justice against an antagonist who is much more evil than you at the very least.
Games without a karma meter that allow for open-ended decision making are more interesting. Pathologic for instance doesn’t tie your ‘karma’ to anything beyond a simple Reputation meter, which is reflected in how the general populace sees you. It might not seem like much of a difference, but it allows for the developers to use their own ideas regarding morality to influence how the townsfolk see you. It’s not a cosmic universal meter that judges you from afar, but a tangible rating that responds to your actions.
Pathologic 2 goes a step further and ties individual ratings to individual districts, meaning that in one district you might have a reputation for being a mugger and a thief, whereas in another you might be a local hero. The game doesn’t care to label these actions as good or evil, instead allowing you to experience them with some freedom – it’s not that the game has interpreted your theft from a local man as evil, but that the people around have spread the word about your actions and they respond naturally to them.
Grand strategy games allow a surprising capacity for evil deeds. Rome: Total War is a classic game that allows you to choose one of three options whenever you conquer a city. You can choose to “peacefully” occupy the city, which grants you the largest long-term economic bonus by placating the frightened and foreign populace, and getting the economy back underway as soon as possible – which might still be a while. You can choose to enslave the populace, spreading your new slaves to nearby territories that you own, providing free (if unhappy) laborers. Finally, you can choose to exterminate the populace, putting the majority of the citizens to the sword and pacifying them completely, but stunting the growth of the area for quite some time.
For a game ostensibly without story, it’s a fascinating method to shape a player’s choices in a natural way, allowing a player to reactively respond to the needs at the time without feeling punished or judged in any particular way by the game, while still having natural benefits and drawbacks to each decision. And certainly these decisions can be classed as evil, but they are evil in a natural way. You don’t arbitrarily come across a puppy that needs to kicked or cuddled to earn points. You make the decision that suits a variety of different factors, which comes with natural consequences that can come back to bite you sooner or later. But it’s not the game making a judgement on the “rightness” of the action; when a game does that, it makes actions feel cheap and manufactured.
Instead, a game with moral decisions feels best when it leaves the ruminating up to you and you alone. This is of course a very hard thing to create in a game, especially a more story-driven one where the desire of the writer is to naturally make the decisions as appealing and interesting as possible, and also avoid ambiguity, which often frustrates players. A common complaint levelled at story-driven / choice-based games is that the consequences of one’s actions aren’t properly telegraphed or signposted. “I didn’t want to kill them because I did xyz!” a player might complain. This can be fixed with, again, coloured icons indicating what kind of choice it is you are about to make.
But that’s difficult in itself because suddenly the developers find themselves in the position once again of having to categorize choices. Is a choice green, red, orange..? The moment a player chooses an orange decision and it doesn’t line up with what they’ve come to expect of an orange decision, they are going to get frustrated.
A game like Pathologic has several different endings one can choose at the end, and these endings are different moral ways of interpreting the story. Is the Town best left in the hands of a ruling family who will make supposed Miracles? Or are the children the way to go? The story throughout the game has been leading up to you choosing one of the endings at the end, but not in a particularly overhanded way. You’ll likely find yourself naturally agreeing with one party over the other for completely natural and personal reasons.
Again, this is very hard to do. But when a game pulls off the ability to be “evil” right, you don’t feel ugly for gaining “baddie points” or whatever the karma currency might be. You feel invested and interested in a choice that might have been difficult, but you took the option that most appealed to you. This generates discussion around the game – why did you make that choice? Defend yourself! etc. A game with a moral choice is interesting because it allows you to do things you might not ordinarily do in real life. But if those choices are as binary and boring as “blow up the town / don’t blow up the town” you get a full understanding of the picture immediately and can basically tell what all the consequences will be.
Rome: Total War has consequences that extend dynamically on from each other. These are gameplay consequences, a natural result of performing an action in the game. Pathologic also has similar consequences. Shoot a bullet? That’s one less bullet you’d have to sell, which might have got you the food you needed to not starve to death today. But if you hadn’t shot the bullet, you might’ve been stabbed and lost a lot of health anyway?
Ideally, a game should represent choice through gameplay, not through static and artificial story beats. A player will naturally feel more invested if it is them who is deciding to be good or evil. This is not to say a linear story can be bad in trying to reflect on morality or good or evil. It can still be as, if not more, immersive. But it’s when a game that professes to allow the choice to be good and evil boils it down to two boring, predictable choices on very set positions on a set of rails that morality becomes boring. It feels like the developer is allowing you to come out and impact something very briefly. Then it’s back to arbitrarily grinding your good or bad meter to get new abilities.
And that’s just boring. No-one likes repetitive actions in video games. At least, I don’t think they do.
Join me next time when I talk more about Evil in games. Probably.
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