"There's never a real moral choice you're ever making in a game, because you're never going to have to live with that choice. We do things in our game to get you to behave better, to make you play together, to have this interaction in a game, but I don't think those are moral choices. I don't think games allow you to make moral choices. Games allow you to be evil, to do bad things. In Grand Theft Auto, I'm going around running people over, and guess what, I'm not doing that in real life. So, in the context of games having moral choices, that's a weird thing to me. I don't think they have real moral choices when I think of that. They have something else, like strategic choices, choices inside their world, but to me a moral choice is something that would live outside of a game. I don't see that." - Valve's Chet FaliszekI think Chet Faliszek has kind of hit the nail on the head of what’s wrong with the video game industry. When you look at the other entertainment mediums that are typically considered ‘artistic’, like music, cinema and literature, all of them have the capability to evoke different emotions, but none of them have the opportunity that games have. An inherently interactive medium, games are essentially putting you as a lead character in a movie, allowing you to make the decisions.
When a game does allow you to make a decision, it typically goes down a very rigid path. Take for example, Shadow the Hedgehog. While the game did allow you to make decisions, upon making them you still had a rigid path to follow; good or bad. What gaming needs to do is split away from those two archetypes and realize the truth. No one is completely good or completely bad.
Adding that level of believability was what catapulted the comic book industry into a different level from what it was. Comics like Spider-Man or Watchmen established characters that had real human issues, they weren’t impervious to everything. Adding this allowed more dynamic storylines and character relations, adding more levels to an already deep medium.
While many have been making the comparison of the gaming industry going down like the comic book industry, maybe games and comics could be following the same timeline, just with a different ending.
At the moment, the industry is dominated by gory first-person shooters, rehashed minigame collections and sports games. The only genre of those that really has a chance for moral decisions are first-person shooters, but even then, it’s going to take a revolutionary game to break some of the traditional ideas that have defined the genre.
For example, imagine an apocalyptic shooter, where essentially you play the father of two children, a son and a daughter, trying to find other people to help you on your quest to restart civilization. You start off in rural Texas, and have to trek to a larger area, scouting out what has happened to the United States.
On your way, you may encounter huge totals of people. For instance, you may run into another growing colony. What do you do? Do you kill them off so, upon recreating civilization, you are king? Or do you agree to join forces to help rebuild mankind faster? Do you agree to be peaceful with one another, but choose to take separate paths? Perhaps later in the game you’re civilization will have all but died off, while the other group has prospered fruitfully. Upon reaching the other group, your refusal to come with them or your attempt to kill them spurs their decision to make you a slave or to plain off you. Adding some sort of backlash to your decisions is the biggest factor to making one regret certain decisions.
Let’s move on to another example; you see another family struggling. Do you take them in and help them recuperate, or do you leave them, allowing your journey to be quicker.
Say you choose not to keep them in your colony. You’ll probably never hear of them again, however, you’ll know that you left a family, not unlike your own, to die. This is probably the hardest thing to pull off in a game, because for one, the family must be memorable enough that the player remembers them even after they’ve been left behind.
But what the gaming industry needs more than anything is for someone to be bold enough to say “Screw saving”. Of course, you’ll want some sort of saving mechanism, but say that the game is constantly saving, unknown to the gamer. What if your son dies in the game, your natural instinct would likely be to reset the game and forget the kid ever died, right? Well, what if upon restarting, the son was still dead. Creating that sort of “never going back” feeling would help actually add some life to your choices.
It’s not a completely original idea (Fire Emblem is notable for it’s “Once they’re dead, they’re dead” mechanic), but actually establishing likable characters that you connect with would allow a game to provide regret to whatever gamer suffers a loss.
Maybe games are destined to go the way of comic books; a medium with a strong following, but just aren’t mainstream anymore. However, by just continuing to innovate, video games could one day be viewed alongside movies, literature and cinema as a versatile and emotion-invoking medium.
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