Morality In Games

As games have developed throughout the years new aspects have been brought into the gaming community to enhance how its audience play the games they have, morality in games is becoming a more popular area to be added into games and gives the audience new options to choose from.

Morality in games can dictate how the game progresses, from minor tweaks in the environment to full blown consequences depending on the players moral standing. This factor is also used in both real and surreal ways depending on the genre of the game and its content.

The Fable series has always weighed heavily on moral choices and its up to the player to decide how they want their character to behave in the world. As a general rule of thumb, games (including Fable) have three general morality modes in which your character will be placed and can shift into throughout the play through. For Fable these modes are:

Hero: The hero character is for the player who has made his or her character make moral choices based only for the good of other people. This can be tough when emotionally involved with the game as it can mean the player will sometimes have to give up or sacrifice objects or sometimes people precious to them in order to help others. In return for the sacrifices you make to help people the other characters in the game will cheer when you walk by and will revere you as their idol, sometimes even asking for autographs. This moral choice effects the character physically, giving the Hero a pure snowy skin tone, blue eyes and a halo, in Fable 2 when you have a dog companion, the dogs coat is golden yellow.

Neutral: The neutral character in Fable sits on the fence of the games morality system and will generally make decisions based on whatever is in their best interest whilst still keeping the public safety in mind, however the neutral character may also steal, cheat and lie in order to get what he needs by the easiest means but will almost always repent whatever evil he or she has committed with a good deed. Other characters in the game will go about their own business around the player and not have any opinion of the player. The neutral character stays as the stock design that the game begins with unless he or she decides to change their appearance aesthetically EG: Hair cuts, tattoos ect.

Evil: The evil character in Fable takes on the biggest change physically and effects the world around him opposite to that of how the Hero does. The evil character will slaughter, cheat, lie and steal for their own amusement and the price they pay physically is heavy. Where there hero character has pure healthy skin, blue eyes and a halo, the evil character sprouts twisted horns from his/her head, their skin becomes dark and scarred and their eyes become a toxic green. The effect this moral choice has on the game causes other characters in the world to run and scream in fear, this can cause problems as when doing missions that require the player to talk to another character, the latter will run away, making it hard to carry out the mission. 

Other moral based games such as Bioshock have no real adverse effect on the gaming world they play in but instead effect what outcome the ending has EG: saving all little sisters will reward you with a calm and peaceful end scene, the narration is soft and thankful for your efforts. Harvesting all little sisters causes the ending to become more sinister with the narrator talking more harshly with tones of loss.

 I believe that the reason audiences are so compelled to play morality based games is that they are given a choice to make their character carry out any action the player wants them to, be it crimes or heroic deeds, because their are no real life consequences such as their are from committing crimes in reality which I believe gives games more of an air of freedom about them rather than having a character that the player cannot mold to how they see fit.