Interesting observation about morality in games

[alexxkay]

Was helping interview a candidate for a game design position today, and in the course of the conversation, he made a really interesting observation:

Videogames that have a morality system typically reward the player for picking one morality and sticking with it through the whole game. If you're always good, you get access to the best "good powers"; if you're always evil, you get access to the best "evil powers". This means that the player is (from a game-mechanics sense) discouraged from having any sort of character arc. If the player acts in a way that implies a character arc, current games can't even recognize that behavior, much less reward it.

Questions for future pondering:
Can videogame main characters have an arc?
If they could, would it be a Good Thing?

Comments

[umbran.livejournal.com]

I think the base observation is incorrect.

"Character arc" tracks the changing status and viewpoint of the character over the course of the story, and does not imply transition between opposing states. Going from evil to good is an arc, sure. But so is going from evil to Even More Evil.

All that you need for an arc is for the character to go somewhere - and further along a given path is still somewhere. So, typical games restrict possible arcs, but that's not the same as not having any arc at all.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Part of what I'm getting at here is that most players in these games make exactly one moral choice: "Am I going to play a good guy or a bad guy?" They never rethink that choice, and the game doesn't encourage them to -- in fact, it actively *discourages* them from doing so.

To me, a character arc implies a choice *during* the story (preferably at a climactic moment), not just a change in magnitude along an axis that you chose at the beginning.