“Are psychotic urges all that drives you?”
—Kreia, Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords

Time for a third return to one of my favourite topics! Evil in games is something I constantly try to figure out, something I dwell upon a lot as I play. As a reminder: morality in video games is tracked mechanically, in a variety of ways. Whether it be light or dark side points, or through simple reputation meters, a player’s presence in the world is often most strongly felt through the effect they have on their character’s morality.

The ability to shape a character’s future (and perhaps their past) by acting through their choices, is an experience that is wholly underrated by many players of many games. Quite often, this is a simple result of a character’s arc being so well disguised that the player’s choices feel natural, a result of the character’s personality themselves. Some choices, in context of the game and character, might seem remarkably stupid. I’m trying to think of a good example of a character with available choices seeming out of character – at this stage, all I can think of are general examples of stupid evil. I have been replaying Mass Effect 2 recently, and found some of the renegade dialogue options to be an offshoot of stupid evil – needlessly antagonistic for no reason, alienating those who could be your potential allies by being a complete asshole. These kinds of actions or choices make no sense, as Shepherd is meant to be a team leader, and the person leading the galaxy to defeat the Reapers (or the Collectors, I guess). Yes, they can be a maverick, but being an asshole is not “cutting through the red tape”. It’s not getting you anywhere faster. It’s just being needlessly cruel or thoughtless with your words.

Stupid evil is often the default for game developers when they need to slot in a new decision. To be fair, it’s very easy to think of stupid evil decisions. Take a decision I invented for a theoretical text adventure title, where you are the leader of a rebellion. Your troops are starving and need food, and you approach a walled city. The mayor rides out to meet with you, surrounded by his guards. You need the food to continue fighting, or many of your troops will die or desert, and winning the war will be much harder. Your choices are:

– Appease to the mayor’s sense of good will, and promise to post troops to protect him from reprisal.
– Threaten the mayor with an attack.
– Order your troops to capture the mayor. You will suffer a few losses but might be able to take the city (albeit in a ruthless way).

These are all relatively fine choices, with a few positives and a few negatives each. Not one of them is outright evil, nor is even the good choice free of negative consequence (you lose troops that you might need in the field later). Now what if I add one more choice?

– Ride up to the mayor and hack his head off without speaking to him.

Notice how this choice feels just a little off? A natural consequence of this choice is that you are swarmed and hacked to bits by the mayor’s guards before your own troops can get to you.

Stupid evil is one of my biggest pet peeves about games with “moral choices” – if a moral choice is always so self-defeating, then why would you choose to play as that kind of character beyond a particular kind of self-imposed challenge? Certainly some choices are allowed to have only negative consequences and only positive consequences, if you want to make things a little more clear cut. But it’s far more interesting for both the narrative designer and the player to make the game less transparent. A choice can have multiple dimensions of positive, negative and even neutral consequences – not always, because I’ll admit that’s really hard to do – but for choices that are telegraphed to be larger, consequences are important to get the player immersed in their character that they are playing. It helps build a player-character rapport when both are suffering through the consequences of a player’s choices, if there are natural outcomes to a person’s choices.

Those natural outcomes don’t have to be entirely predictable, either, but there should always be some indication, whether before or after you’ve made the choice, that something mechanically is going to happen as a result of that choice. Here’s a really simple binary choice, but with simple double-edged consequences: you get a better sword that corrupts you further down into the Dark Side, or you cast that sword into the abyss but redeem your character’s previous evil choices. This is such a simple choice, and likely the sort of one you’ve seen in many kinds of games before, but it’s such an effective one too. In games, we tend to associate the “evil” path with more powerful items but less friends, say. So the game is easier to get through, but you feel worse about doing it. You want to avoid designing a game that has no reason to play evil mechanically, as the natural consequences of playing evil should be relatively self-defeating most of the time – especially stupid evil. The good path is basically the reverse of the evil scenario I just described. A game like Vampyr leans really hard into this – if you choose not to eat people, you’re missing out on a bunch of XP that makes the game about ten times easier to play. But, if you’re stubborn, like me, you won’t eat anyone, because you want the “good ending” and the shiny achievement that comes with it. And here we reach a particular problem with the choice system.

If the location of a choice on the choice wheel is always indicative of the points you will get from the choice, then the player is no longer reading the dialogue options. They are seeking the points – regardless of how they get to it. I can’t say I played Vampyr with a thought towards being “good for good’s sake” – I knew there was an achievement at the end of it, and I still enjoyed the process of playing through the game and the story (after a few early roadbumps where you really do need that XP). I guess the question I am posing today is – what effect should being evil have on the mechanics, even if those mechanics are outside the actual structure of the game? Most games these days have achievements, and if there is a moral choice component, the developers insist that we go back and see every single choice there is, or at least do one “ultra-good” playthrough and one “ultra-bad” playthrough.

This is almost an extension of the Mass Effect Paragon / Renegade problem. If you start earning one kind of point early on, you might as well just keep earning those points, ignoring the other kind of choice because it doesn’t gain you anything mechanically. You are meta-gaming the system, even as the narrative designers thought breaking out of “Paragon / Renegade” could have helped avert this. If I am playing through a game with the knowledge that I am only doing this to get an achievement, perhaps this is a personal failing on my part. But it also calls into question the necessity of these kinds of achievements. Perhaps it is a minute problem that no-one else really thinks about, but if I do feel the need to 100% complete a game after I’ve played it through once (that’s normally when I decide to go back), but sometimes I’ll make the decision to get the achievements on one run through (as with Vampyr), such artificial achievements feel entirely like padding. Perhaps that’s what such achievements are for – time padding – but they take away the feeling that a player is making expressive decisions.

Last time, I talked about the point of evil in games – even if you don’t choose it, you feel you could have made a different choice. Perhaps selfishness, or some cold-hearted pragmatism, could have got you out of the nasty situation you’re in. But when you are, in some way or another, encouraged to make singular decisions, no matter how stupid they are, you are harming the experience of the game. If you are choosing options because the designer says the only way forward, the only way to “really play our game”, is to min-max to perfection, then the choices you are making aren’t really choices at all. And you’re not wondering with any curiosity as to what the other choices were – you’re content with the fact you got your points! We’re encouraged to think that way as players – but there has to be a better way.

Linking morality directly to mechanics seems like it should be a really clever idea. But for most players, it means that they are playing your choice-based video game as a linear experience, regardless of how stupid evil (or even stupid good) their choices are. One more problem on this front is that a player can often go from “very good” to “very evil” in the span of one dialogue choice. So after we’ve uncoupled direct mechanical reward from the number of “good points / evil points” a player has, we might want to think about how to change good and evil points from being something mechanically beneficial to something we can use as a narrative tool.

What if we had a game that responded directly to the reputation of a character, and the player’s previous choices? Say we’re having the same choice I discussed earlier, but with two reputation bars: Moral and Pragmatic. We have the same choices, but with some added mechanical checks that accurately reflect a player’s reputation:

– Appease to the mayor’s sense of good will, and promise to post troops to protect him from reprisal. He will only believe you if you have acted in a moral way previously. Otherwise, you will have to work hard in a dialogue tree to convince him.
– Threaten the mayor with an attack. This will only work if your previous choices have been ruthless enough to back up this threat. Otherwise, you’ll have to bluff.
– Order your troops to capture the mayor. You will suffer a few losses but might be able to take the city (albeit in a ruthless way). A purely moral character might not even have access to this choice.

See how the dynamic of the scene has shifted around the mechanical impact of previous choices? All of a sudden we have deliberate and noticeable feedback around a player’s choices. We build a player-character rapport, increase immersion in the world, and avoid (at least partially) the problem of a player metagaming. A moral / pragmatic meter in this case should probably be invisible, and choices can appear more naturally as a result of character reputation, not fluctuating from ultra-good to ultra-evil. But not all evil choices should be obfuscated for good characters, just the same as not all good choices being obfuscated for an evil character. Otherwise we have exactly the same problem as before, with a linear game emerging from our choice-based game.

So while it’s not necessarily a perfect solution, it’s something to think about with moral choices in games. We want to avoid stupid choices that have no visible benefit for the player regardless of their moral alignment, and we ant to avoid a choice-based game becoming linear because of any kind of mechanical restriction. So, when you are designing a game, please stop putting in “complete your game as ultra-mr-nice-guy”, please. If I like your game, I’ll have to finish it. And boy, does that kind of thing leave a bad taste in my mouth these days…