@Gamer_152: Here we come down to the real problem, which is that the human implementation of altruism (if we stick with the deferred greed definition that is inherent to this concept) is fairly abstract. Generally we don't draw a clean line between an altruistic action and the thing that we hope to get in return. Sometimes it really comes down to "It would make my life easier if people behaved this way, so I will do so in the hopes that it will encourage others."
Let's advance into MMO territory a bit. Let's say you were playing an MMORPG that didn't have any factions. Instead, you had a relationship with the characters in the game. During the tutorial segment you teach the player that allies are helpful, and also that there are rewards to be had by messing with people. You then never talk about it again. At some point paragons and cheats will come into contact with each other and note the significant differences between the ways that their characters have progressed. The cheat will have a bunch of stolen equipment and lots of hoarded gold, the paragon will be a little poorer but will presumably have collected more difficult to find items, and have friends that they can call on. The idea is to always be asking the player this question in a subtle way, and to eventually pull back the curtain and let them see what they have accomplished. This is as opposed to presenting the player with a very clear mechanical system and telling them that to really win they must play to extremes.
And really, in the end, is there even a problem with this being a mechanical system? Presumably if a designer has decided to include morality in their game, it's because they have something that they want to say about it. If they build it such that being altruistic confers and advantage in the long run, and being neutral or evil is very short-sighted, then they are essentially building a system that reflects that view about real life. The player thinks "well, this path will work out best for me so I'll do that," and then hopefully starts to apply that reasoning for real life.
This is actually the real artistic strength that I see in video games. Instead of saying "X path leads to Y" (like a linear artwork) they can say "X system leads to Y with Z outputs." This makes it bad at some types of messages, but great at others.
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