I’ve spent the last week or so waging war microbial baddies who have set up camp somewhere in my inner ear. While launching antibiotic salvos in to their front lines, I find myself completely unmotivated to do anything but sit while I spend my time head cocked to the right and a grimace on my face anxiously awaiting the battle’s conclusion. What goes better with a complete lack of motivation to do anything but sit than video games? I spent the last weekend playing through Bioshock for the XBOX 360, a first person shooter by 2K games set in an alternate reality of the 1960’s in the underwater objectivist dystopian city of Rapture which now lays in near ruin and is inhabited by highly genetically modified mutants and other nasty things. I could spend hours describing it, instead, watch the trailer-
Aside from strangely out of place American Dollars, resources in the game are ADAM and EVE. ADAM is gathered in two ways which I’ll get to later, and EVE serves as your mana for casting spells… Only in Bioshock you’re not casting spells, you’re using Plasmids, or genetic enhancements to shock, burn, or even dispatch swarms of angry bees at your opponents. Overall, the game is really great. All of its downfalls can be easily overlooked when you first set eyes on how stunningly beautiful the game is. The ambiance and overall atmosphere are literally second to none. Despite the inevitable rant which will follow, if you have a PC capable of playing Bioshock or a video game system it is available on, rent/purchase ASAP.
With this much good comes a fair share of bad, most of which involves around a “moral choices” system. In recent years, morality systems have become the latest fad in video game development. Sure, there have been a ton of games in the past which allow the player to choose to be good or evil, but never before has it been so prevalent in that nearly any game with even the slightest roleplaying element features some level of forcing the player to follow a good path or an evil path. In Bioshock, this choice is proposed to the player on how you gather ADAM. “Little Sisters” (the little girls from the above trailer) are scattered throughout the game world, and when you encounter one you’re given the choice of harvesting them or saving them. Harvesting a Little Sister yields more ADAM, but kills the Little Sister in the process. Saving them, obviously saves the Little Sister, but you are rewarded substantially less ADAM. By choosing the good path and saving the Little Sisters, the game becomes more difficult as you find yourself with less ADAM to purchase character upgrades with, but you’re rewarded with not being evil. …Except, really, it makes no difference.
Without spoiling anything substantial, the only thing that changes regardless of whether or not you go on a Little Sister murderfest that would put even the greatest child serial killers to shame or if you save every single one of them is about 20 seconds of full motion video at the end of the game. You’re also awarded another Plasmid which could do something cool, but I doubt it’s cooler than having massive amounts of ADAM to purchase every available upgrade- Needless to say, I killed them all, and it barely even mattered. This is normal for games which boast “moral choices”. Your choices either have almost no effect, or the game provides a series of choices for you and they’re so ridiculous that you’re forced to either be God’s angelic spitting image or ridiculously evil to the point of being silly.
Fable, a game for the XBOX, is the absolute worst offender for a stupid moral system. If you haven’t played it, here’s the trailer-
Instead of having moral choices which were essentially meaningless, you had moral choices which changed the entire game… except you couldn’t do whatever you wanted, instead you could only do one of the few choices the game presented to you. For example, the game often provides you with stereotypical roleplaying game situations where you’re forced to either go on some quest to retrieve an item which would further align you towards good, or you could say screw it, and murder the foul knave who had the audacity to ask you to do his dirty work- Obviously this would give you points towards evil.
This may seem like an extreme example, but this is how the entire game progresses in a nutshell. Also, because if you so choose you can follow every evil option and just murder everyone you come across, no particular person you meet has much importance in the overall story line.
The closest game I can remember playing which comes to a “good” (highly subjective) moral choice system is Knights of the Old Republic, a Star Wars roleplaying game also for the XBOX.
Your alignment to the force actually had a huge effect on the game, and depending on if you were a light or dark Jedi, the last third or so of the game was surprisingly different. Characters in the game world respond differently depending on your status, and you were able to use different abilities. So what’s the problem? The choices you’re given to determine your alignment are so amazingly stupid. Most conversations have blatantly obvious options and you’re forced to choose between goody two-shoe or jerky prankster.
What am I getting at here? Moral choices are dumb. No game outside of Nethack has the depth to make a game where you have free-thinking choices work. There’s nothing wrong with linear games which play out more like a interactive movie than a free world where you can do whatever the game allows you to do, some of the greatest games ever made don’t allow you any choices ensuring a tight knit plot which makes sense.
Oh well.
