Digital Cowboys: Episode 140
Posted on : 23-01-2010 | By : Alex Shaw | In : Podcasts
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A Question of Morality.
We’ve brought in Daniel Floyd once again, this time to discuss the topic of his latest animated lecture, based on an article by James Portnow on the challenge of designing games with ambiguous moral choice.
The situation so far has been Renegade/Paragon; being a total arsehole or a goody two-shoes and somewhere in-between an under-powered and frustrated player of games trying hard to make decisions that seem realistic. Portnow’s article argues that it’s possible to achieve more and in this episode, we look at the supreme design challenge that this represents. We also assess the difference between problems in a game and choices and how rarely the latter ever show up.
Many thanks to Daniel for joining us and adding his usual brand of classiness and incisiveness and also to Mr Portnow for the inspirational article. More people like these please.
Stay tuned at the close of the show for a fantastic Tim Minchin song and a cherry on top.
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OK, have a few points to make (as always
) so here I go.
On Choice. The problem with a lot of choices in games is that your are rewarded with the fruits of that choice almost immediately, leading to that problem that you can save just before and try out both options to see what happens. Games would do better to extend the time between choice and conclusion to obscure the direct analysis of those choices. If the results of a choice made didn’t come into play until you’d made three other choices things would feel a lot more organic and your wish to go back and try the other option would be ofset by having to loose maybe an hour or so of game play time to go back to it. The other aspect, which was mentioned on the show, is to remove the material rewards from choices, have them more related to changing the story of the characters rather than make a choice based on which weapon up upgrade you can get from that choice.
Another aspect that was mentioned was the difference between playing Mass Effect and Fallout, with ME being third person with a preset look to your Shepard. I feel that approach makes it easier to play Shepard as his/her own character. Often we choose the ‘good’ choices as we are effectively playing ourselves and we like to think of ourselves as good people, by making Shepard his/her own character you feel freer to play them as something other than yourself.