Inspired by a surprisingly insightful forum thread from last week, I found myself thinking a lot about the consequences and moral weight put on the shoulders of players in games, particularly violent ones. I was lucky enough to spend the last weekend relaxing on the beaches of Okinawa without the distraction of electronics of most kinds, but the crystal blue sea was far too enticing to spend too much time thinking about it. It was not until I returned to Osaka that I really started to think about murder, violence and aggression in games, and the moral implications therein.

It is a well known fact that players do not like the idea of irreversable consequences if both paths lead to a continuation in the plot. Most player like the idea that a bad choice leads to a game over, while the good choice continues with the game. The idea that two significantly different plot lines could be completely viable seems not to sit right with players. I recently started playing the Dragon Quest V remake for DS, and was rather surprised how difficult it was for me to pick who my character would marry. Even though the effects of the bride are not huge, the fact that choosing one option would close all others off to me for the rest of the game actually did not sit very well with me. When we consider the of our choices in real life, we often look to choose the one that is both morally correct and most beneficial to ourselves.

In games, we're often never really faced with the repercussions to our actions, unless they are a pivotal moment in the story, and even then, the consequences are often binary, resulting either in the continuation of the game, or in a game over. This method is a blunt but effective way of steering the player in the direction the developer feels is correct. Often times this method tends to staccato certain events in the story as "pivotal", giving them more weight than other instances in the game. This can help to draw the player's attention to interesting or important plot points, but it can also serve to trivialize others. Grand Theft Auto 4 is an excellent example of this.

While Nico is given the the moral choice to kill or spare the life of specific people in the game, these moral choices serve only to further trivialize the fodder that Nico inevitably mows down in countless missions before and after that event. Add to that the fact that the player often commits grand theft auto, vehicular manslaughter, and mass murder during a date with a woman who might or might not be a police officer, and a lot of the morality in those individual instances starts to feel forced and forgotten. When the characters within the world don't seem to care, the player doesn't seem to care either. Running over pedestrians, shooting multiple people before a single police officer is even called to the scene, and even stealing cars in broad daylight may serve to tell a story of a once great city gone wrong, it also (purposely, I suppose) trivializes Nico's actions, whether they be good or bad. In that sense, though, GTA is not alone.

Most violent games never give pause to the cruelty and violence that we partake in, especially in first person shooters. I am no prude that thinks violent video games should be banned or censored. I play my fair share of violent shooters and action games and quite enjoy them. The issue lies in the one dimensional reality they live in. Hollywood has its fair share of testosterone-filled action movies and has its iconic action heroes for every era. It also has its introspective war movies that meditated on the horrors of war. The games industry is in no short supply of war games, but they often times glorify war, and even when extreme violence and the horrors of war are presented, they're never shown in a way that makes the player reflect on the complicated moral implications. Not all games trivialize violence and death, though.

While players had no choice but to kill each of the creatures in Sony's Shadow of the Colossus, the somber music, the subtle visual clues, and the often benign existence of the colossi made players start to question whether or not killing these majestic beasts was really the right thing to do. Even in victory, there was no fanfare; only a sad song to punctuate their deaths. How developers go about introducing morality into the story is their choice. Bioware tried several times using the light/dark meter in several of its RPGs, and was successful to an extent, but there is so much more potential in the idea of morality.

Forced morality and immorality never gives players a chance to really think about the repercussions to their actions, because the game does it for them. Giving the player choice, giving AI characters appropriate and permanent reactions to the player's actions, and changing the world (even subtly) to reflect the player's actions are all great ways to add weight to a player's actions. Even then, these might still not force the player to give pause.

As Shadow of the Colossus did, eliciting emotion through visual and aural clues might be enough to create thoughts of regret in the player's mind. If we really hope to have the industry taken seriously, and see it evolve the way the movie industry has in the last 70 years, tackling complicated issues like morality is a necessary and inevitable course of action, especially when violent subject matter is concerned.

NOTE: Because of a recent flood of hateful and immature comments, I've had to change the comment policies for the blog. Only wordpress members may post comments from now on. If this continues, I'll be forced to disable comments altogether. I really don't want to do this, as I really like getting some of the insightful comments past articles have inspired. Sorry to everyone who wanted to comment but do not belong to wordpress.

UPDATE: I have removed the wordpress membership requirement for comments. Instead, all comments will go through approval before being posted. Again, apologies to those who could not comment until now.