Paragon or Renegade? Good Karma of Bad Karma? Many games (most commonly in role-playing games) attempt to give players some form of morality by creating a meter that dynamically changes depending on the choices the player makes during their adventure. On paper, this idea sounds great! Having the game accurately record what good and evil actions the player is performing is very interesting. However, there are major issues I have with these styles of systems that I believe undercuts exactly what the system is trying to produce.
Essentially, I feel like there Morality Meters either diminish or completely take away the morality in their games. There are several games that allow players to help people by doing things for them, or even giving them items and money to boost their “good” meter. For instance, Fallout 3 allows their players to give bottled water to beggars. This increases the player’s Karma, which is the game’s morality system. The issue I have here is that you aren’t giving away your water for any morally good reason. You are doing it because it will raise your “good” meter. The water that you give to beggars can easily be obtained by finding one on a corpse or spending a small amount of money to buy another, so it’s not like you are really losing out on much.
I’ll give you another weird morality example. I remember a specific scenario where I had to fight an entire faction of people to defend a settlement, and I obviously did not lose any morality for doing so since I was defending the weak. However, I still lost morality for “stealing” items in their base after they were all dead. Why is the game telling me I am a bad person for taking items that do not belong to anyone? These two scenarios showcase two major issues I have with morality meters:
Morality meters make people do “good” and “bad” actions to affect the meter, not because they actually want to.
Morality meters tell the player what is right and wrong, instead of allowing them to come to their own conclusions.
It makes players do actions in the game specifically to raise or drop this meter, instead of allowing the player to sit and really think about how their character would handle the situation. For instance, I would bet that players would have a hard time stealing from someone if they are playing as a “good” character. No matter what the situation is, someone trying to stay on the “good” meter would never do so in fear of dropping it. What if they are a good person, but they are stealing from a thief or evil individual to help the poor and helpless? Well, the game thinks you are doing bad, so you are sacrificing your “good” meter to do so.
I feel like it takes away from what morality should be. If you are only doing actions to raise or drop a meter, you aren’t truly thinking about the moral repercussions of your choices. If they want to do a good thing that requires sacrifice of goods or supplies, they shouldn’t be rewarded with a meter. It completely undercuts the entire sacrificial nature of doing good deeds. I do not think games should tell you what they believe is right or wrong. I believe that morality should be left to the players. They should be the ones to determine what where their moral compass lies within the world, not be told so.