metagame

I want to talk about moral choices in games, but before I get there, I need to take apart choice in gen­eral. Don’t worry, we won’t get bur­dened with issues of free will or invent ter­mi­nol­ogy for ludoethics. Metaethics would be a dif­fer­ent blog.

Games demand deci­sions. Every act of the player, every input and every but­ton press, is an act of choice. With­out choice — and action to com­mu­ni­cate that choice — there is no player. Only audience.

I always res­cue Zoey, unless Heather has chores to do.

Of course, game choices can fre­quently be reduced to “per­form this action or stop play­ing.” In a lin­ear game, the player must con­tin­u­ing mov­ing for­ward. If Mario doesn’t keep run­ning and jump­ing, the game is sus­pended. Or put another way, a player isn’t tech­ni­cally forced to use a gun. How­ever, if Zoey doesn’t shoot the zom­bies, the player wit­nesses a bloody ending.

To be hon­est, you should stop me there. I’m over­sim­pli­fy­ing. There can be a lot of tac­ti­cal choices that get tied up with game exe­cu­tion. Tetris deci­sions are cer­tainly tac­ti­cal, but they can also dis­play plan­ning and risk-taking that goes beyond the moment. In a dif­fer­ent exam­ple, when the player guides Sam Fisher to take out (or not take out) a bad guy, a series of inter­est­ing choices can be the result.

Today, though, if a designer speaks of a game cen­tered on player choice, he or she is prob­a­bly refer­ring to choices that are more strate­gic in nature. Deci­sions that come about in calmer moments, moments of intro­spec­tion. Let’s look at some of these strate­gic choices, and what value they add.

Mis­sion choices. This means we’re talk­ing about a game that has non­lin­ear ele­ments, per­haps truly open world. The game offers mul­ti­ple direc­tions or objec­tives for the player to pur­sue. Selec­tion could be geo­graphic, result from AI inter­ac­tion, a directed inter­face, or other means.

The value of mis­sion choice seems obvi­ous. The player can eval­u­ate risk and reward, deter­mine which facets of the game he or she wants to empha­size or ignore, and decide to pur­sue a game’s pri­mary story arc (assum­ing it has one) or instead explore side mis­sions and other content.

Advance­ment choices. The player can improve and cus­tomize the char­ac­ter or even the world, boost­ing skills, build­ing options, or acquir­ing new abil­i­ties. Since choice is involved, this occurs not merely through a lin­ear or auto­mated pro­gres­sion, but through the selec­tion of power-ups, the con­struc­tion of a base, etc. One or more forms of resources get involved–experience points, time, money, or some other form of game currency.

Speak­ing of cur­rency, one form of advance­ment is purely eco­nomic, involv­ing the buy­ing and sell­ing of equip­ment, prop­erty, or ser­vices. Advance­ment and eco­nomic devel­op­ment may be one in the same, espe­cially in the sim or real-time strat­egy genre.

Ben­e­fits of advance­ment include game­play vari­a­tion, increased replaya­bil­ity, empow­er­ment, and a grow­ing attach­ment between player and character(s). Even more impor­tantly, advance­ment ful­fills desires for self-improvement and growth that are more dif­fi­cult to attain in real life. Depend­ing on how the game devel­ops, advance­ment could man­i­fest as wish ful­fill­ment, power fan­tasy, or some­thing more mature.

Moral choices. Choices made with a moral intent sup­port the player tak­ing own­er­ship of his or her character’s fun­da­men­tal nature. The player is likely to act in accord with his or her desire to have the char­ac­ter attain a cer­tain moral stand­ing. Advance­ment sys­tems tie in, unlock­ing new abil­i­ties or bonuses once the char­ac­ter has com­pleted suf­fi­cient moral or immoral acts. These choices invoke their own econ­omy, even if they tracked with­out being spent.

It takes a num­ber of bad deci­sions, and one good one, to reach this ending.

Pre­sen­ta­tion is often overt and binary. Overt: tak­ing place dur­ing non-active game­play, dur­ing con­ver­sa­tion or some form of action cin­e­matic. Binary: only two scripted choices are avail­able, usu­ally mes­saged as good or evil action. The prover­bial ridicu­lous exam­ple: do you feed the puppy or kick the puppy?

Moral­ity sys­tems com­bine, at least poten­tially, the value of mis­sion and advance­ment choice. Like advance­ment choices, moral choices offer replaya­bil­ity, empow­er­ment, and that increased emo­tional con­nec­tion between player and char­ac­ter. They rep­re­sent an advance­ment lad­der of their own. Like mis­sion choices, moral choices offer player con­trol over game direc­tion and activ­ity. As moral choices can have effect on the exter­nal game world, they stand out as fun­da­men­tally more pow­er­ful than character-based advance­ment choices. The player chooses between actions, not poten­tial abil­i­ties. As a result, moral choices rep­re­sent the most inter­est­ing and game-effecting sort of a choices a player can make.

At least, in the­ory. More soon.