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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?
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?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-04 07:04 pm (UTC)On the pure morality level, it's hard to even define reasonably in a single-player game. One appeal of the game is that you can do things consequence-free, or at least with different consequences than in the so-called "real world". To the extent that morals are heuristics of behavior evolved into us based on consequences from historical contexts, they simply do not apply the same way in a limited-consequence game.
Games that try to reward/punish/notice "morality" based on modern real-world sensibilities hamfistedly transliterated into a fantasy world with different cause-effect laws are unlikely to ever get it right; they're modeling it on the wrong level.
In a MMO, of course, some types of morality make sense - behaviors that detract from others' fun are generally verboten. Arcs in this dimension absolutely happen - ninja-looters or lazy greedy guildmates can reform and become valuable teammates, and the reverse is seen as well. I'm not sure these arcs should be encouraged by designers, though.