I think that the candidate makes an excellent point. Let's take it as read that we're talking about story-driven and character-driven RPGs, or at least that the point may not be relevant for games that focus on neither story nor character ("Mario, get over your feelings of guilt and throw that turtle shell at Wario's cart!")
I think that Ultima IV was actually a pretty decent attempt at a videogame that used player character morality as a drive for the story arc, so that the character's moral code gradually developed in parallel to (and with two-way feedback with) the story arc.
For those who don't know / don't remember Ultima IV, it was the last of the turn-based / square-based Ultima games, released in 1985. Unlike any of its predecessors (and unlike any other game to that point that I can think of) it didn't have any arch-villain to defeat, but was instead driven by the character's development in eight virtues (based largely off of the Chivalric virtues-- Richard Garriot IS in the SCA, after all, and even named most of the NPCs after fellow Prominent Persons in the Kingdom of Ansteorra...)
Consider that model against, say, Bioshock, where the moral decisions (which, on the face of it, were pretty extreme: murder innocent little girls, or rescue them) had surprising little effect on gameplay (a slight variation in how your grossly abundant XP were delivered and on what you could spend them) and even less on story development (two different cut-scenes to end the game, depending on whether or not you murdered *too many* innocent little girls, where "too many" was, inexplicably, a number greater than zero).
Consider each of those models against, say, the narrative arc of character development in Death of a Salesman, or Macbeth, or even A Farewell to Arms-- the basics of narrative story that we require every high-school-educated citizen to learn-- where characters evolve and change, for good or ill, developing and/or applying their moral decision-making right there before our eyes...
Yep, I think that your interviewee has an EXCELLENT point, and that he'll be a tremendous asset to whatever story-creating venture he works with. If you're lucky, it'll be yours.
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I think that Ultima IV was actually a pretty decent attempt at a videogame that used player character morality as a drive for the story arc, so that the character's moral code gradually developed in parallel to (and with two-way feedback with) the story arc.
For those who don't know / don't remember Ultima IV, it was the last of the turn-based / square-based Ultima games, released in 1985. Unlike any of its predecessors (and unlike any other game to that point that I can think of) it didn't have any arch-villain to defeat, but was instead driven by the character's development in eight virtues (based largely off of the Chivalric virtues-- Richard Garriot IS in the SCA, after all, and even named most of the NPCs after fellow Prominent Persons in the Kingdom of Ansteorra...)
Consider that model against, say, Bioshock, where the moral decisions (which, on the face of it, were pretty extreme: murder innocent little girls, or rescue them) had surprising little effect on gameplay (a slight variation in how your grossly abundant XP were delivered and on what you could spend them) and even less on story development (two different cut-scenes to end the game, depending on whether or not you murdered *too many* innocent little girls, where "too many" was, inexplicably, a number greater than zero).
Consider each of those models against, say, the narrative arc of character development in Death of a Salesman, or Macbeth, or even A Farewell to Arms-- the basics of narrative story that we require every high-school-educated citizen to learn-- where characters evolve and change, for good or ill, developing and/or applying their moral decision-making right there before our eyes...
Yep, I think that your interviewee has an EXCELLENT point, and that he'll be a tremendous asset to whatever story-creating venture he works with. If you're lucky, it'll be yours.