Evil. How do you begin to quantify or define something like evil? A while ago now, I had a go at showing how developers have used evil in game design in the past, in games as varied as Knights of the Old Republic and Rome: Total War. Today, I wanted to discuss a bit more about what makes evil such a difficult concept in games.

I’m an optimist most of the time, and I generally like to believe that humans, underneath it all, have a good nature. Of course, that can be pretty hard to believe sometimes. But video games, being a place to explore morality in a safe place, can often still reflect the average attitudes of most players. These sorts of stats can be interestingly reflected in, say, the achivement/trophy statistics for video games with good / evil endings. A game with one of the simplest possible binary endings, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, is evidenceof this. And before you say anything, of course it’s binary! It’s Star Wars! It’s simple stuff. You are given a choice at the end – confront the Emperor and save your allies to found the Rebellion (the obvious good choice), or settle for killing Darth Vader (the equally obvious evil choice). On PlayStation (as measured here on PSNProfiles), the stats sit at 21.98% evil completion, and 37% good completion. Now, that’s pretty reflective of two things: that players tend to prefer to play as good, and also that the Evil ending is harder to achieve than the Good ending.

That is, it seems, a curious design decision – Darth Vader is easily the more challenging opponent of the two. When I was younger, I struggled to face Vader down, whereas the Emperor felt like he wasn’t even trying. It makes evil the path of more resistance, whereas in a lot of games, evil is the path of less resistance mechanically, or at least time-wise. Why struggle to scrape together money in The Age of Decadence to help the less fortunate enter the sanctuary of the town of Teron when you could spend that on some more armour or weapons for yourself? Why bother running all the way across town in Pathologic to help someone survive the Plague when you could just save both your in-game resources, and your energy? Vader being more difficult reinforces a simple message – revenge is bad, and you have to protect your friends. Basic messages, of course, but also easy enough to reinforce through this simple choice through gameplay – crucial when building a game with a moral narrative, and the capacity to choose your character’s moral destiny.

For game designers, you can also make this choice as to whether evil can either be the harder or the easier path to follow, should your game have a moral decision making system. Do you want evil to alienate potential allies and make your path forwards even more difficult than it might have been before, just for new story beats? Or do you want to make it mechanically rewarding? Balancing alternative paths in video games is fraught with difficulty – developing content that a significant proportion of the players of your game is potentially content wasted.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines allows you to be an absolute monster at many opportunities, siding with cruel vampires who wish to to dominate and destroy, or a selfish, independent jerk, rejecting the hands of every potential ally who offers aid. But those paths are not likely to be taken by any but the most stubborn, or the ones bent on total domination of the game itself; to see everything it has to see, and to know everything there is to know. But the very fact they are there grants the player more than the illusion of choice – it gives them the knowledge that things could have gone differently. And that’s a precious feeling for the game designer, especially the game designer that wishes for their game to be replayed. Curiosity is one of the biggest drivers that makes me replay a game. What could I have done differently? In an esoteric game like Knock-knock, which only has two endings (a good and a bad), but with uncertain mechanics as to how to obtain those endings, replaying the game was crucial to understanding its complex mysteries.

In Mass Effect 2, a player’s poor (or deliberately cruel) decisions in the final mission famously result in the deaths of party members you’ve journeyed with throughout the whole game. Provided a player has put in the legwork to earn the party members trust earlier in the game, the decisions in the final area are pretty easy to make in order to ensure their survival. For the most part, Mass Effect 2 players can be reassured with the knowledge that they have to go out of the way to kill their actual party members (though the extended crew are indeed easier to kill). The mechanical reward for evil actions in Mass Effect are Renegade points, which, the larger the total, allow for Renegade dialogue options to be chosen. Those dialogue options resolve things in more “optimal” ways – like fights between party members ensuring both party members remain loyal, rather than just one. In game design circles, Mass Effect’s particular system has come under fire for essentially force players to play full “Paragon” or full “Renegade” playthroughs to receive the most mechanically beneficial rewards. Roleplayers might find this less egregious, but the point remains – evil in Mass Effect 2 is a choice that relates purely to good, in that when the player has taken their first steps down either path, the other is essentially locked out.

So the root of the question is, in relation to video games – why bother? Why bother being evil? If less players play as evil characters, then why develop content to appeal to the few players that do? If good and evil are often so exclusionary, then why not just flesh out one path that appeals more to the game designer? Well, we can look at a game with a non-binary morality system that encourages the player to judge themselves more than the game could ever adequately judge them. It is an example I have indeed used in previous articles – The Void.

In The Void, evil goes by another, more sinister word – pragmatism. You have to conserve your own energy, while also giving in the right quantities. The right quantities are ones that allow you to progress through the game and preserve the survival of your favourite Sister (your principal allies in the game, however manipulative they can be at times), while avoiding attracting the Brothers, who withhold things from the Sisters and act as selfishly as possible to ensure the survival of themselves, and the world that they live in. The game doesn’t have the branching paths of Vampire, but it does provide interesting and dynamic moral decisions that relate to the very core essence of the apocalyptic setting itself, and the gameplay surrounding it. Evil in The Void is grey, but nonetheless satisfying to see the consequences of your actions, when you get the chance to expend energy and put down the Brothers in violent ways, or even to abandon one of the Sisters whom you dislike for your own petty survival, or the survival of others you prefer.

Fallout 3, a post-apocalyptic game ostensibly about the struggle to survive in a harsh and cruel world, struggled to meaningfully connect its gameplay rhythms to its story beats. Sure, you can rebuild the world in the main story, but the world, despite its ramshackle state, doesn’t seem to really need or want your help, and everyone is doing okay. The main story doesn’t change anything beyond “people die or people don’t die”, whereas in the other games I’ve mentioned, like Mass Effect 2 and The Void, the main story and the moral decisions you make simply feel like you have more impact because a) you get more choices, and b) you get to see the consequences of your actions much more clearly. Abandon a Sister to die in the Void, and you win in the short term, conserving your Colour, but losing access to a Sister’s chambers, restricting your movement and options on the overworld map.

So why be evil? Why grant players the opportunity to commit evil acts? Because of that precious feeling of what could have I done differently? And even if, on a subsequent playthrough, the central premise of the ending remains the same, the little changes can be enough to make players like me feel a replay has been worth it. If I chose to spare or save an individual; if I chose to ally with the corporates or the rebels; if I chose to convince the bouncer out the front of a Santa Monica drug den to let me in because I’m just so damn beautiful instead of beating the crap out of him with a baseball bat – these are my decisions. So as games become ever more corporate, ever more commercialized and homogenized – I think we need to remember the good examples of choice in video games. The ones that make us feel like we are making genuine, individual choices – even as we’re aware there are finite options within these lines of computer code. This is maybe something I’ll explore a bit more when I inevitably revisit the topic to organize my thoughts on the matter once again, but there is the opportunity in the future to create even more meaningful games that provide both engaging binary moral choices, and increasingly grey and complex moral decisions that demand individual engagement and sets of different value systems. A fascinating, and challenging, future for the video games industry lies ahead of us. Can we as consumers and players get through the next games we play with our souls intact, one way or another?

Games and Evil I
Games and Evil III