When I was in elementary school, my teachers always went over the classroom rules on the first day. Every year, the rules were the same: prohibitions on chewing gum and wearing hats and entreaties to stay in my seat and to keep my hands to myself. Don’t punch anyone! In fifth grade, though, everything changed. Instead of presenting “rules,” the teachers presented “rights.” Most of these were silly, just the same rules rephrased in hopelessly vague ways. You have the right to a learning environment free from distraction. Don’t get punched by anyone! I couldn’t grasp the fine points of pedagogical theory that led to this new iteration of the old rules. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me; I wasn’t really given the opportunity to do anything new, even if the teachers told me otherwise. But I was pretty sure that the teachers and the administration could not imagine a school where everyone went around punching each other.
Morality systems in video games make me feel a lot like that fifth grader. Developers sell morality as an innovative new aspect of gaming but deliver something that is just a sloppy rewording of the most persistent rule of video games. It’s a rule that has existed since Space Invaders and has flourished since Doom: In this game, you will engage in combat with increasingly able enemies, so press the fire button until you win. Morality systems arbitrarily highlight some of that combat, but do little else. Several times during the game we will allow you to choose which of two people you’d like to punch or, maybe, whether or not to punch anyone at all! I’m left feeling pretty sure that game developers can only conceive of video games as experiences viewed down the barrel of a gun.
People exist within dozens of rule systems that dictate which behaviors they can engage in and the consequences for deviant behaviors. If I rob a bank, I will go to prison because I violated a rule of law. If I jump out of a plane without a parachute, the rules of physics will make me go splat. Video games are interesting because they can offer new sets of rules to explore and manipulate. That’s what separates video games from other entertainment media. That’s agency. True innovation is something that offers a new kind of agency or changes the way a player experiences an existing kind of agency. Innovation can be as simple as Wolfenstein’s first-person perspective, changing the rules from “shoot everyone before they can kill my guy,” to “shoot everyone before they can kill me,” but it has to be systemic. Morality systems in action games have not yet provided new agency, they have only superimposed themselves onto the same old game mechanics and rule sets. Whether or not these systems are well imagined, well implemented, or internally consistent will be irrelevant until they do something to change the kill-kill-kill rule set of those games.
Bioshock was at the forefront of the morality movement and is an example of why morality systems fail to deliver their promised innovation. Many critics discussed how compelling the Little Sister choice was (is choosing whether or not to kill a little girl really ethically gray?) or whether the developers hedged too much, making the consequences too similar no matter which option the player chose. But all that misses the point. Despite its presentation, the morality system asks the player the same question about Little Sisters that the rest of the gameplay asks about every other living thing you come across: Would you like to kill this? Consider Bioshock’s treatment of Big Daddies. The game structures Big Daddies identically to Little Sisters. Big Daddies are drones conditioned by Rapture’s bad-guys to do a particular job, just like the Little Sisters and even the player’s own character. They won’t attack unless provoked and you could simply skip them. And, hey, if you don’t kill a Big Daddy you won’t get any Adam at all. Now there’s a choice with consequences. Bioshock does not present Big Daddies as parts of the morality system. The decision to kill them is taken for granted. Should players care about the fate of Little Sisters more than the fate of Big Daddies because one looks like a cute little girl and one looks like a weird comic-book villain? Bioshock provides no better explanation. Subsequent morality systems have primarily addressed the same types of combat questions. Would you like to kill Wrex or not? Would you rather kill Ghouls or Tenpenny Tower residents? Would you like to kill all these bad guys and get cool electrical powers, or leave them alone and get different cool electrical powers?
The desire to innovate and to move video games towards cultural relevance is understandable and commendable. But the way to innovate is to take advantage of video games’ unique ability to manipulate rule sets. The Guitar Hero franchise created an entirely new rule set and sold millions of copies without ever asking me how virtuous a drummer I wanted to be. Morality systems that merely allow players to specify the manner and target of combat do not change the rules of action games, they reword them. That’s no more of a leap forward than the “fully destructible environment” was. There is literally nothing in this game that you cannot punch! Change the rules, young man. Change the rules.
