"Bereft of good and evil are games without morality"?

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Wilbefast
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"Bereft of good and evil are games without morality"?

Post by Wilbefast » Fri Mar 12, 2010 5:59 am

Found an interesting article over here. Nobody ever seems to have played "The Witcher" :?


Thoughts?

WolfArmored_
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Re: "Bereft of good and evil are games without morality"?

Post by WolfArmored_ » Fri Mar 12, 2010 6:00 am

meh, too much to read.

oh btw. Deus ex

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Zhukov
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Post by Zhukov » Fri Mar 12, 2010 7:18 am

Makes sense to me. I definitely agree that explicit "morality systems" aren't up to much.

I'm trying to think of games that handled morality well. Sadly, very few come to mind.

Deus Ex did a decent job. On the one hand, the player is occasionally reminded of the humanity of their enemies (by Paul, by the parents in the restaurant, by QM Carter, by various e-mails referring to Gunther). Furthermore, the player is given plenty of non-lethal means to take down said enemies. On the other hand, the game does not punish the player for killing.
I thought it was pretty effective. I know I certainly made a point of using the non-lethal stuff whenever possible. Also, at first I didn't have any qualms about killing the MJ12 guys since they seemed pretty evil. Then I met those parents. From then on it was tear gas and tranq-darts only.

I also thought Far Cry 2 was pretty interesting, although for different reasons then those mentioned in the linked article. The enemies would often exhibit some very "human" behaviours that invariably made me feel sorry for them. On one occasion I was sneaking through an abandoned train yard looking for a good sniping spot. All of a sudden an enemy stepped out and started blazing away at me. I drew my sidearm and shot back, wounding him, then took cover. A second enemy emerged and began dragging the wounded guy to safety, all the while reassuring him that everything was going to be all right. Despite having a clean shot at both of them, I suddenly found myself entirely unwilling to gun them down.

Those are the two most prominent for me. There would probably be others though. Mass Effect perhaps? The renegade/paragon thing wasn't so great (renegade basically just boiled down to being rude and/or evil while paragon meant being polite and saintly) but it did have some interesting dilemmas.

So, uh... yeah. Basically I agree with the author of that article.

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Re: "Bereft of good and evil are games without morality"?

Post by Wilbefast » Fri Mar 12, 2010 8:02 am

Clearly I need to play Deux Ex - people keep talking about it and I don't know what they mean - it has a platinum rating for Wine too :)
Apparently there are graphics-update mods: any suggestions?

I played KOTOR and The Witcher trying to be as neutral as I possibly could, sort of like this guy:


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Re: "Bereft of good and evil are games without morality"?

Post by tokage » Fri Mar 12, 2010 10:01 am

I think this guy didn't play Kotor enough to judge, because I think Kotor really has the problems he mentioned. Sure, there were some quests like the one with the droid he gave as an example, but the alignment of dark and light side of the force was exact the same good/bad as numbered morality system he rightfully criticizes. Even worse, you get rewarded for maxing the alignment out(or was that only Kotor2?) so you get punished for staying morally ambivalent and the sometimes unclear/misleading consequences of actions will thus lead to frustration, instead of giving you the satisfaction of defining the morality on your own. Of course the traditional good vs evil morality is an inherent trait of the SW universe so they didn't have that much choice. I think more traditional AD&D RPGs like Baldure's Gate did a much better job with morality described in the article.

Maybe I too should get around to play Deus Ex again. When I first played it years ago I didn't like it very much and didn't even play the second mission. I think my problem was, that I wanted to solve the first mission perfectly like I wanted and just had too much choice (and not enough skill).

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Re: "Bereft of good and evil are games without morality"?

Post by Endorgan » Fri Mar 12, 2010 4:59 pm

I just just got Deus Ex.
I've so far found myself crouched almost the whole time, and just now I tried to throw a LAM into a doorway at the top of the Statue of Liberty (or whats left), which missed, landed next to me, 'sploded, then the Mercs in the doorway came out, and I think a guy behind me tranq'd me.
[command-q]
Then I come on the Wolfire Forums and see a topic about this.
And make a post.
Ta daaa!

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Re: "Bereft of good and evil are games without morality"?

Post by Renegade_Turner » Fri Mar 12, 2010 8:36 pm

I don't know. I enjoy these types of systems. Fable and Fable 2 is the only game I've played where it's seriously annoyed me in, and I quite enjoyed those games as a whole. As the article says, I didn't like how it was like gaining points. You might argue Fallout 3 was the same, and in a lot of ways it was, but not in the blatant point balance system of Fable 2. Anyway, I would prefer if more games were more like Mass Effect 2 in this aspect. At least instead of the Fable system.

I will agree about Deus Ex. That's the first game I can actually remember that made me feel like a cunt for taking certain actions. And I rarely feel like a cunt, because I'm great.

But yes in any RPG hybrid game these days there seems to be a morality system. It's mainly in D&D-style RPG games and Action-RPG's. It's becoming like a gimmick. Industry standard. If you've developed an RPG hybrid game and it doesn't have a morality system, WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN DOING?

Oh a game I will mention which deals well with morality, but in a way less obvious than the whole morality-points-system way, is Demon's Souls. This game seems really cool. You can enter another person's game using the online multiplayer service, upon which you can do different things. You can try to help them by leaving messages and stuff, for one. However, you can also try to kill them and take all the souls they've collected. LOL

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Endorgan
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Re: "Bereft of good and evil are games without morality"?

Post by Endorgan » Fri Mar 12, 2010 10:59 pm

Renegade_Turner wrote:However, you can also try to kill them and take all the souls they've collected. LOL
Thats pretty asshole-ish, especially after watching some of its gameplay,
however if I did get it, I would do the same thing. hehehehe :mrgreen:

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Re: "Bereft of good and evil are games without morality"?

Post by TheBigCheese » Fri Mar 12, 2010 11:20 pm

I totally agree about the hidden morality topic. I skimmed the article, but the quote near the center definitely emphasizes the best way that morality should be handled. Morality is simply the effect that your actions have on the world around you, and what those effects imply about yourself.

Regardless of how you accomplish it, if you become a dictator over a large country, there are still people that are going to see you as morally evil. On the other side, if you become a dictator by murdering all the others on your way to the throne, there should still be those that believe you to be morally good.

Pretend for a moment that there was an outbreak of a virus across a country with about 3,000 so far that have been infected. Is it morally right to kill those 3,000 innocent people to protect the millions of others? Is it morally wrong to let them live and risk the infection of the entire country?

These are the kind of moral problems I'd like to see posed in games, not simply something good or bad. Something with consequences.

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Re: "Bereft of good and evil are games without morality"?

Post by Wilbefast » Sat Mar 13, 2010 4:52 am

I've been planning to do an infection sim ever since watching "28 Weeks Later" and playing "Zombie 4" - think it'd be really cool having to balance between being effective and being a cold-hearted bastard.

Imagine there's an anarchist spreading the disease: if you just nuke everyone you'll be playing right into his hands 8)

I liked how in the Witcher it wasn't just a case of counting up your good/evil points at the end and giving you an appropriate cinematic, but rather various actions had specific consequences. It was better not having a "good score" and an "evil score", because it put the onus is the decision itself, not the points you'd be getting for it.
What annoys me sometimes is how in most each decision is completely separate from the other: you can be a complete and utter tool, but people will still come begging to you, asking if you'll save their children. What gives? I guess ultimately you need to do everything via simulation (AI) rather than scripting...

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Re: "Bereft of good and evil are games without morality"?

Post by Nitsua » Sat Mar 13, 2010 11:16 am

Although you couldn't make any choices, Shadow of the Collosuss had some good morality.

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Re: "Bereft of good and evil are games without morality"?

Post by Wilbefast » Sun Mar 14, 2010 4:29 am

"bereft of choices, are games without morality?"

Nah - you go into ethics in films and books. Out of curiosity - who here knows the difference between "morality" and "ethics"? I'll give you a hint: one has strong Christian overtones.

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Re: "Bereft of good and evil are games without morality"?

Post by Endoperez » Sun Mar 14, 2010 6:13 am

IIRC ethics is the part of philosophy that studies morality, while morality is what people think is right or wrong.
So morality is how people think they should act, and in ethics people learn what kinds of morals exist.

No idea which one is supposed to have more Christian overtones.

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Re: "Bereft of good and evil are games without morality"?

Post by Wilbefast » Sun Mar 14, 2010 6:25 am

"Ethics", for the Ancient Greek, governed all aspects of life: even ridiculous things like "should I wear a red hat" are part of ethics. People talk more about ethics when it comes to things like Free Trade Coffee, and morality when it comes to deception or murder.
"Morality" has taken lot more specific sense, only really governing family life - it's been somewhat divorced from business life since Adam Smith (the invisible hand). The word "Morality" is very much tied up with Christianity in the West.

Other people will define the two differently of course - language is somewhat ambivalent.

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Re: "Bereft of good and evil are games without morality"?

Post by tokage » Sun Mar 14, 2010 7:40 am

For me the main difference would be, that ethics focus on the effects your action will have on other people(or you and the world in general) while morality is more a comparison of the actions against a codex of morals (often defined by a religion or authority), where the actual effects are of secondary concern.

Think about it that way: sex before marriage is ethically OK as long as noone is forced to it and there are no third parties involved (e.g. cheating), but morally it is wrong (in an now in large parts old-fashioned christian moral system). But at some point in history, there probably was a good ethical reason to put up that rule (maybe it had to do with the problems a single mother has to face; now with contraception the risks of that happening are significantly lower I guess).

This would mean ethics are more a set of general rules, that won't change, and moral value systems are specific rules derived from ethics in specific contexts. "The consequences of action A are bad, because you wouldn't want the same consequences for yourself, if someone other did it to you. Therefore you better not do action A" gets simplified to "Don't do action A, never".

If the context changes moral value systems will become outdated, but the ethic rules won't, only the consequences would be different.
Of course moral value systems are also much easier to abuse by the defining authority by introducing rules that favor the ones in power.

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