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

[dagon.net (from livejournal.com)]

Most good CRPGs have some form of character arc, though it's not usually a morality arc per se, more of a world-understanding and power arc, which can include some amount of morality as you learn of betrayals and are faced with interesting decisions where you're uncertain of underlying structures.

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.