Morality - Making games feel more real since 1980

The morality system has always been a big part of games. It’s the fine line that separates evil from good. Mass Effect, Bioshock, inFamous, Fallout and Fable (and more) have all had a morality (or karma) system. Even games like Missile Command released back in the 1980’s had a morality system. But games like Missile Command didn’t have the morality system spelled out in big bold letters or had bar like image to show how much people see you as a hero or villain. No missile command didn’t have any of this, it didn’t even hint that it had one. But what did make missile command have the morality system was you!

Here is a quick rundown of missile command: You have 6 towns and 3 missile silos. You use the missile silos to shoot down an endless army of meteor’s to protect your silos and towns. This is where the morality system comes in, see there are a lot of meteors and only few missiles, after the first few rounds you are going to find it harder and harder to protect your missiles and the towns. You have to make a hard to decision to just purely protect a certain amount of towns and let one go, or only worry about one town and just purely protect your missile silos. But no matter what it seemed deaths were always because of you, and even though it was just a pixelated 1980’s video game, it still left you feeling like a prick for allowing a town to die.

Its small things like that, which put you in a tight spot, were you have to decide who to let go. With the games I mentioned before (see: Mass Effect, Bioshock, inFamous, Fallout and Fable (and more) have all had a morality (or karma) system) it seems that choosing between the good guy and the bad guy is easier, until a game called “I am alive” appeared on the market. It turned the morality system into a mutated creature from hell. Once again what you do will not affect anything in your game, but it will leave you feeling guilty. In I am Alive all resources are scarce, most of the time in the game you will only be carrying 2 first aid kits and a couple of bullets (and only a few of other items). So when you come up to some innocent civilians who are in a bit of trouble (extremely sick and need a first aid kit, or trapped in a locked room which only a bullet can break) and you have to make the choice to keep your items to yourself and have the guilt building up inside you knowing a few pixels are going to die, or share your items with everyone but make your life that much stressful because you can’t afford to take too much damage (< If you gave up your first aid kits). It seems like no matter what you do, you are always on the rough side of the stick.

More and more games these days are including the infamous morality system and that is definitely a good thing (as it adds more depth and emotion to the game) but one thing developers need to remember, you don’t have to have writing constantly coming up and a bar to represent your karma, all you need is to make us think!