What is good? What is bad? Chances are the game giving you a choice is telling you the answer. Video game morality is often black and white, or maybe it’s red and blue. There is often little room for grey or purple.
Infamous: Second Son uses player choice a lot like the previous Infamous games. You are rewarded with good karma for deeds deemed to be good and evil karma for deeds deemed to be evil. Being good will grant you access to powers exclusive to that alignment. Evil will do the same but with the evil alignment. This sort of defeats the purpose of having a player choice system in the first place, because you’re being told what’s good and what’s bad.
The weird thing about Infamous’ choice system is that it works. Infamous’ hook is the whole comic book hero and villain thing. It’s isn’t necessarily thought provoking, but regarding how the game plays and how the story unfolds, it works. It isn’t practical for you to change your tune on a whim. You’d be giving up too much to suddenly become good after being evil for so long. It makes for easy choices, which benefits you and keeps you on the path you started on, but it also means the choices don’t really matter. If you choose to be good at the start, you’re probably going to be good until the end.
Infamous: Second Son even goes extra lengths to ensure that you stay on your chosen path, locking missions based on previous choices or your karmic disposition. This sort of thing works best when your game is as black and white as Infamous is. Playing through a second time to see the other ending is easier when everything is so clearly labeled for you. It’s a system not without its positives, and it’s easier to understand. The problem is that it feels like a gimmick, even if it is sometimes effective.
There have been strides made to get away from this sort of system in games like Telltale’s Walking Dead that forces you into impulsive decisions or non-decisions by adding a timer. A closer look at the Walking Dead reveals the choice you make doesn’t matter too much, because the end result is often the same. However, there is still the social experiment end of it, where at the end of each chapter it reveals what choices other people playing the game made. Regardless of if you took a peak behind the curtain to break the illusion, it’s interesting to compare your choices to the masses.
The Witcher series puts you in the shoes of a character who isn’t expected to be a hero or villain. The distinction of good and evil is more up to the player than the game with the choices you will make as Geralt. The Mass Effect series approached choice by making all the choices result in the greater good. Choices were labeled as good and bad, and there often was a more neutral option, but it still benefited you most to lean completely to one side and play the game over if you got curious as to how it would have looked if you had taken the other side.
Games will continue to explore the concept of morality and player choice, especially those in which its core to the game. With its more simplistic red and blue morality model, Infamous: Second Son served as a good reminder as to how much player choice has evolved in recent years. It will continue to evolve, but it seems to me that there is already a pretty good place to start.
A choice and its consequences will have much more of an impact when I get to decide what the right and wrong choices are. I don’t want the game telling me what is good and what is bad. That sort of black and white concept has its place, but in order for video game morality to grow, being grey should be more appealing. Most people aren’t all good or all bad. Most people are somewhere in the middle. Choices and their consequences ought to better reflect that. Let me be purple, but also let me think I’m blue.
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