As an effective and well defined way to adding player agency to the narrative, moral choice seems to be becoming increasingly common in games. Indeed many game series, like Infamous, Mass Effect and The Walking Dead base their entire core systems around making moralistic decisions. Sometimes these systems are simple, as in the binary Jesus vs. Stalin choices of Infamous, and sometimes they are complicated, as in the messy grey judgement calls of Walking Dead. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to be talking about games which have a clear “good” and “evil” option, specifically Infamous and Fallout.
Personally I don’t have a big problem with binary morality systems, especially when your character might have a clear justification for being a bastard, such as in the Fallout games. What the choices you make actually influence gameplay wise differs depending on the title, in Infamous you’ll get different superpowers, with the evil ones being powerful but indiscriminate with a lot of collateral damage, and the good being much more accurate. With Fallout you may get different quest rewards, get to skip part of a quest or have different characters to interact with depending on your decisions.
What options you take should have an impact on how you play, but I sometimes have an issue with the ways you are rewarded. In both of these games, you will receive just about equal rewards for being good or being evil. In Infamous the good powers and just as powerful as the evil powers, they are just different. With Fallout you may sometimes get different items as a reward, but usually they will be roughly worth the same. But by doing this you are turning these choices merely into a roleplaying decision, simply depending on whether the player decided they wanted to be good or evil when they began playing.
There should be strong incentive in the game for the player to be a prick. When a player makes a “good” choice that should mean sacrificing something, because most good actions will cost you (my word, I’m starting to sound like Ayn Rand). So, if you come by a dying traveller at the side of the road, you can leave him to die, perhaps returning to nick his hat at a later date, or you can give him some of your very limited supply of water so he can walk off never to be seen again. Instead of making an arbitrary decision early in the game whether to be the good or the bad guy, the game is asking you to reconsider your stance with every decision you make.
Yes, you want to be the hero, but you’re always quite fond of not dying of thirst.
If good choices are just as selfish as evil choices then they’re not really good choices at all. Evil comes with short term rewards while good often offers none. If you want players to actually think about morality it needs to be presented in ways which will lead them down a dark path unless they’re actively willing to fight against it, not merely as a roleplaying choice that comes down to the mere personal preference of the player themself.
