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by Jerry Whorebach 07/01/2010, 5:39am PDT |
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Kotaku's Joshua Wise wrote:
Video games have only recently begun to consider the nature of moral choice as an integral piece of a game's mechanics. Developers have started to craft experiences that will allow the player's moral and ethical choices to affect the context of their gaming experience.
Could this be an oblique reference to budding young firebrand Richard Garriott?
Kotaku's Joshua Wise wrote:
There are few developers, however, that have made the transition from merely allowing the player to affect the physical world to enabling him or her to influence the people and events in that world with more than a gun, sword, or spell-book. Of these, Bioware's Mass Effect games are perhaps the purest example of how these kind of systems have been implemented thoughtfully and effectively.
Oh, it's going to be one of those articles :(
Kotaku's Joshua Wise wrote:
One objection to this particular way of doing things might be that when people are going bad, they just don't realize it Medieval theologians viewed evil not merely as a form of guilt, but a privation, something that removed life and knowledge from people. The popular apologist C.S. Lewis expressed this by saying that Goodness knows both Good and Bad, but Evil doesn't know either. This might lead to an alternate implementation of the choice system. If one constantly chooses the bad choice, the interface might change to reflect the assumptions of the character in the world. If the good choice is always in the upper right and in blue, and the bad is always in the upper left and red, perhaps the more one chooses bad, the red begins to look a little more purple, and then finally changes to blue. The good choice will shift to the same purple, so that at some point, only their positioning differentiates them. It too would continue its color change until a shift back to good, or a full delving into wickedness once utterly and finally changes their colors to their opposites. When both become purple, might it not also possible that their position on the screen may shift randomly, so that the good choice is not always on the right, and the bad not always on the left.
Then if you still made all the good (blue) choices, at the end of the game there would be a phone number you could call and someone would have phone sex with you. To stop people from putting the number on the internet, it would be a different number (and a different person) each time.
Kotaku's Joshua Wise wrote:
Expressing the knowledge and perception of goodness would be a bit harder to implement, but if one were to attempt to duplicate what the philosophers and theologians tell us, perhaps some further explanation of the result of each choice is made available to a player playing the straight and narrow. It might also be possible to reward bad choices more quickly (as has been done in the Bioshock games) which would be a trade off for the information provided to characters who choose the upright path.
Even BioWare's very first game, shitty old Baldur's Gate, had a reputation system whereby demanding payment for heroic deeds would be rewarded immediately with gold and weapons, whereas doing them out of the kindness of your heart would be rewarded over time through discounts in shops and more favourable reactions from NPCs. So not only has this guy invented, in space year 2010, not colour-coding "good" and "evil" choices (or, more accurately, colour-coding them a complex system of purples) so you actually have to read and think about them, but he's also invented a rudimentary form of Dungeons and Dragons' alignment system. BIOWARE HIRE THIS MAN IMMEDIATELY. |
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