Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Amorality in Games!

Games don’t really pose complex moral questions, by and large. There are some games that make hackneyed attempts at forcing players to deal with absurdly black and white situations, games that allow them to make overarching choices imbued with all the subtly of a brick to the face. The medium just hasn't been used to convey the reasoning that pushes people to commit good deeds and evil acts. Perhaps it is simply ill-suited to the purpose.

Maybe it's the fact that in order to give these systems some weight the choices you make often impact gameplay. For exmaple, Bioshock’s touted choice system can be boiled down to an economic decision, and the cartoonishly stark nature of the choices makes it all too easy to do so. Murdering children is less a moral choice and more a transparent exposure of why you play games. If you do it it isn’t because you actually believe that killing the children is an appropriate moral choice, it’s because you want to engage in the fantasy of being a fucking comic book villain and pick up a little more ADAM (60 more, if memory serves, per Sister).

Then there are games which don't attempt to add in a game mechanic to their morality and instead offer branching options which don't seem to possess very much weight. Some of these branching options even make an effort at appearing morally ambiguous, as in the case with GTA IV's climax.

But Grand Theft Auto IV’s much touted, youth corrupting amorality doesn't really deliver. We’re never really given the chance to operate as a criminal, as someone who solely pursues courses of action for his own benefit. Instead we’re asked to walk the line between two criminal fictions: the misunderstood hero and the comically inept villain who constantly walks in to traps instead of acting with one whit of common sense or self-preservation and preemptively destroying his adversaries. Our "moral choices" are reduced to the options of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, and steps are actively taken to make it more difficult for players to form their own interpretations of Nico's actions. The end result is less the effect of a treatise on the fluid nature of human morality and more that of a young man rambling about crime fiction.

Perhaps it’s a product of the medium being so young. If you want to take a look at some truly atrocious portrayals of moral and philosophical extremes in different media Metropolis. A great film in so many other respects, it is a prime example of beating your audience over the head with your point. And it took a long while for books to attain the moral complexity of Joyce or Carver or even Swift. Even if the change seems to emerge faster and faster in younger media it’s still bound to take time.

Or perhaps it comes from the people drawn to the medium of games as a means of telling stories. While there are some amazing people drawn to games, it doesn't seem that many of them are drawn to writing them and creating characters to inhabit them. While there are certainly writers who do so, it's also fair to say we simply haven’t attracted many people who are interested in telling a nuanced story with a believable villain or anti-hero. However, despite this prevalence of chaff there are great examples of both in games, and I'd like to pull a pair from some of the budding auteurs of our day.

The first one, with its passionate portrayal of both a deeply sympathetic and believable villain, is Portal. Brief, wonderful Portal. GlaDOS is nothing if not sympathetic in her own quaint way. The player is meant to pity her by the end of the game: living in relative isolation, undone by her own programming and the growth which her creators hoped for her to attain, she’s had a hard life. She’s just trying to do the best she can

In making a genuinely funny robot Falsiek and Wolpaw manage to make a resonant, believable villain, possessed of as much humanity and pathos as any literary figure. Hell, more than some. GlaDOS eventually comes to terms with her grief. She manages one better than Dostevsky’s Rodion Romanvich, who cannot process his own actions. GlaDOS likes who and what she is, and she imbues herself with purpose. Even if the world is falling apart, after all, someone’s got to do the science.

Basically what I’m saying is that video games have already trumped Crime and Punishment in terms of their ability to generate a relatable and believable character and, moreover, villain (fucking Raskolnikov). And they did it by making a genuinely funny game where the villain in question is a giant computer. A game with a protagonist who never speaks, which seems to be one of the keys to making an identifiable and relatable reader figure for us to control.

Of course, not all protagonists need be silent. In fact a well-written protagonist can tell us a great story and elicit a strong emotional response from players. And if this protagonist is really well written he can act selfishly and amorally and never make players think twice about it. Enter Wander of Shadow of the Colossus.

As the game opens we're confronted with Wander’s plight: his girlfriend is dead and, in his bereaved state, he’ll do anything to bring her back to life. Even engaging in a morally dubious bargain with some sort of shadowy demon and pissing off giant stone monsters that could kill him by accidentally stepping on him. And he’s going up against these creatures with little more than a sword, bow and an amazingly loyal horse with a learning disability. We’re immediately drawn to him, his underdog status and his timeless goal of getting the girl (albeit in a roundabout cheat the reaper fashion in this case).

We want Wander to succeed, even though we barely comprehend what he is undertaking. Instead we begin with his motives. We think his goals are worthy and therefore we ally ourselves with him. We aid him because he’s doing something brave and important, something we could see ourselves doing in the same situation.

And when we uncover the reality of his goals and realize just how sinister they are, we still want him to succeed. When it becomes obvious that the life is slowly draining out of him, that he is working to resurrect an ancient evil which could threaten the entire world, we still want him to emerge victorious.

Perhaps part of this association is owed to the dark portrayal of the priest and his party. From their very introduction we see them cast as both a threat and cowards. They venture into territory Wander braved alone in a large group, armed to the teeth and aimed solely at undoing our protagonist. Certainly they’re justified in wanting Dormin to remain entombed, but their intractable stance on the matter and their uncompromising methods serve more to alienate players than anything else.

Pair this with the fact that they murdered (or sacrificed?) Mono and it’s easy to see them as the bad guys in this situation. Sure, Wander is working to resurrect an ancient evil, but they’re huge dicks about the whole thing. And they killed his girlfriend. Are they truly any better than Dormin? We never see Dormin do anything evil, we just have their word he is. Also he’s a shapeless black fiend whose life force created giant monsters, but we have no proof that he wanted them to behave that way. And perhaps it had something to do with their upbringing. I doubt that Emon was nice enough to stick around and teach those Colossi family values after they were created from Dormin’s sundered power.

Shadow of the Colossus is a game in which every character can be seen as a total son of a bitch, and as a result they feel like real characters. We don’t have cartoonish exaggerations of human behavior or over the top choices. Instead we have ambiguous actions which we, as players, imbue with purpose and meaning. This is the sort of thing games need to be working towards.

Portal and Shadow of the Colossus both, at least in how they tell their stories, place great trust in their players. They give the player plenty of chances to “do it wrong” and start over again. They don’t wrap the whole plot up in a nice neat little bow. They don’t force players through every area of the game, requiring them to get the most complete possible picture of the world.

Instead they take a light hand in the way they treat character development and interaction. They offer up villains and protagonists we see ourselves reflected in, villains and protagonists who feel real. We’re never asked to make a moral decision but we still feel the weight of our actions and we see the impact they have on the world around us.

As a result these games ask the moral questions that the hackneyed systems of Bioshock and Mass Effect cannot. Is it right to create life and control it slavishly? If it rebels against us does that make it evil? At what point does a creature fighting for itself survival and mimicking its previous masters become evil? And at what point do we become evil in fighting for survival against thinking, breathing creatures who seem to only want to keep us safe and have, at best, touchy ideas on how to do so?

Is it wrong to oppose the establishment when it ceases to value the lives and rights of its people? Is it wrong to ally yourself with similarly maligned parties, to risk everything you have to try to make a difference in the world? Or, on the other hand, is it right to risk the entire world, even if it is for the life of someone you love and the freedom of life in general?

Games like Portal and Shadow of the Colossus, with their carefully crafted characters, believable words and relatable perspectives, offer a more compelling system for incorporating and encouraging moral contemplation in games than any heavy handed internalized system offered up which serves to encourage choices by offering some sort of technical reward.

By focusing on the issues of character development as just that, issues of character, they manage to elevate the medium of games. They allow us to have real discussions about games, the way they make us feel and the way they influence our lives. They make games into a legitimate form of expression, no mean feat when they’re forced to stand shoulder to shoulder with the moustache twirling Raskolnikovs of the industry.