Hey bud, forgive the year late comment.

I just want to ask: why do you get to decide what is moral in a game, why do you feel it is your responsibility to make the player a “better person”, and why is your idea of “better” more important than anyone elses’? What makes you sure of what makes a moral choice “meaningful”, and how do you know your audience will agree?

Games can be fun with hard moral choices, but you must understand that you should put them in only if your audience wants them and if they accent the game well. I loved the political turmoil in Dragon’s Age: Origins because it put me in positions that would always make someone I liked mad. The characters were having a moral dilemma, and not the designers. Every situation felt legitimate and fit with the plot of the game.

I can not stand games that use moral choices at face value. Fallout: New Vegas has this reputation system that changes only based on how many people I’ve killed or how many quests I’ve created. The system only got in the way, and I felt the designers were trying to tell me to “behave”. As someone who has designed games, I do not want to ask my gamers to bend to my subjective moral perspectives if I can avoid it.

If you really want to make wholesome ethical dilemmas with the intent of challenging the player emotionally, I would argue you have less of a game and more of a virtual world as an art piece. This is fine, but I and a TON of people I know play games to be huge assholes. We get tired of the stresses in life and just want a place to act however we want to UNLESS we are in the mood for more of a thinking man’s challenge. I totally agree that the line between reality and games are blurring, but we have the right to choose the emotional depth if the reality we interact with. If I want to grab a virtual gun and kill E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E, let me.

The truth is, the highest quality information relevant to good moral values does not come from any game/movie/book/etc, and it never will, period. The best experience you can have for becoming a better person is to merely go out and interact/adapt to society. Trust me, as interesting and engaging as some of the moral choices I reflected on in media were, they did not teach me much since the situations were purely hypothetical.

I’m not trying to say you’re wrong, I’m just saying that it might be a little much to stress morals to meet your personal (and therefore biased) definition of “art” in spite of gamers, art appreciators and businessfolk who may not agree. I think I speak for a good many of us when I say that I have enough of a sense of urgency and emotional intelligence just from going to work and college.

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Wonderful article! Very thorough and insightful

Getting great writers on board from the beginning seems indeed to be key. Today, most developers focus on novel forms of game play, and only after come up with a story, woven as the framework, and limited in budget since it is perceived as varnish. Story will always remain awkward and peripheral that way.

What if, instead of trying to infuse more story into a game, we start with the story, and, trying as much as possible to clear our minds of preconceived notions about what a game should be, conceive interactivity to suit our particular story-world. Stories can and have been told through so many different mediums; apparently, even cinema, at its beginnings, had yet to discover its own strengths and struggled to imitate theater. Today’s games mostly work with cut-scenes, which clearly try to imitate cinema, and thereby fail to develop and profit from this new medium’s own strength.

So… start with the story, and then see what interactivity can bring to the telling of your story.

It is a fascinating subject, and a medium as yet in its infancy.

Great article!