Tuesday, November 16, 2004
 
Video Game Ethics: Part Three - Lying
You know, I thought this would be easier than it was. I mean, I've been playing video games for most of my life, and I've been thinking about them in the abstract for just about as much time. So, the idea of analyzing the different aspects of ethical conduct in video games seemed like a no-brainer. The first two were easy, Murder and Theft. There's lots of those in video games, but very little else in ethical concerns.

For instance, lying. I've got examples of games that let you give responses to questions, but they are very old examples, and the responses were always fairly limited. There's very little opportunity for lying, and when the opportunity is there, the games seem to spend very little time doing anything with the information.

By the way, this whole post is completely devoid of action games, as they never ask questions ("Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no lies.")

Types of questions:
  • Gameflow-altering questions: These are questions that define the direction that the game will go. For instance, at the end of Half-Life, the protagonist is offered a chance to join an elite group headed by the apparent antagonist. The rest of the game is dictated by this decision (granted, the rest of the game comes two minutes later when the player either walks off into the sunset, or gets pounded on by a really staggering number of enemies). These questions usually come up at the end of the game, and help define the last few seconds of the game (basically, would you like to win, or lose?).

    Rarely, does a game allow you to alter the gameflow early (because, that requires that the game developers create a lot of content that may never be seen). If they ever do, chances are that there's another hook that will invalidate that choice (for instance, in Deus Ex 2, the player can decide which side of a given battle to be on, but the player gets the same missions either way. The briefing is just given by a different talking head.)

  • StoryTelling: This type of question is posed as a multiple-choice question, with a prepared answer for each. It goes like this, you walk up to a milkmaid and initiate conversation. She says, "Hello", and you respond with "Where is this village?" or "Where is the wizard?" or "Where are my pants?" The milkmaid will respond with an answer like this: "This is the land of milk and honey", and then you get to ask questions like "Milk? Honey?" It feels a lot like hyperlinks on a webpage.

    This gives you the opportunity to slowly, inexorably, draw out the small bit of story that this milkmaid is keeping. And if you navigate the menus correctly, you might even find out a secret! This is what makes people step through all the menus, even when they know what the answers will be.

  • Inventory Questions: Sometimes a NPC (non-player character) will send you out on a mission ("Go bring back the vicious Chicken of Bristol") and you return two seconds later. The NPC who gave you the mission will ask "Did you find the vicious Chicken of Bristol?" and you can respond positively or negatively. Here's the thing, though. The game can (and will) check your inventory to see if you have the mission item. So, if you lie about it, your NPC will say, "But I can see by your pack that you are full of it! Don't come back until you have the Chicken!"

    Now, on the one hand, this can be used to test or influence a players moral standing. You could store how often a person tells these lies, and refer to them as a cad or a bounder throughout the game. But games generally don't do that. You can come back two seconds later, and the NPC will still ask, "Did you find the vicious Chicken of Bristol?"

  • Moral questions: Ah ha! These are questions that affect the game itself is small subtle, but noticable ways. For instance, in Fable, lying can make your character's morality bar shift toward the evil side, and away from good; and in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, lying will shift your alignment from the light side to the dark side.

    Notice a similarity there? The only games that give a damn about lying are games that deliberately monitor your alignment. Once again we see that if something is not directly part of the gameplay formula, it is completely ignored by game developers. That is neither a good thing, nor bad. But it is worth noting that there are very few morality-based games out there.
So, basically, you have only a few types of questions. Gameplay effecting (very few, and usually toward the end); Storytelling (Far too many, but limited opportunity for original input); Inventory questions (Not many, and usually toothless), and moral questions (very very few, and even then, only in games that concern themselves with morality).

There are very few questions in video games, and among them, very few attempts at moral / immoral input. It is worth noting that the games that employ morality are very ferverant about it, and they usually try to show consequences of the moral choices. But there are still very few of them.

Why are there so few games that allow lying? Because it's not good gameplay. A player knows walking into the game whether he wants to be good or bad, and any attempt by the developer to make the player do one thing or another is seen as an imposition. As I noted in the previous post, players are barbaric. They don't want to be ethical, and they feel like the game is annoying when it tries to dictate morality to them.

So, in this situation, unlike murder and theft, games seem to be taking a pro-active step. Although there are few games out there that pay attention to lying, those that exist show penalties for it (thus, in theory, encouraging the players to be moral). Can't fault them for that.

Tomorrow, Sex!


Powered by Blogger
Visitors since October 7th, 2004

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.