The title of this thread made me lawl. Thank you.
Quote:
Originally Posted by After a brisk nap
Obviously it recalls a number of discussions we've had here on the forum. Maybe Trep will finally get the kind of adventure game he's been asking for all of these years.
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I've read those discussions. It'll indeed be interesting to see if Trep would enjoy the game, although I doubt its nonexistent-budget production values will appeal to him. We shall see. *shrugs*
Quote:
Originally Posted by After a brisk nap
I remain pretty doubtful that making moral choices can provide sufficient satisfying gameplay. Given that all these events are imaginary, it takes a lot of skill to make players really care about the results of their actions in the first place, and I think the addition of options/branching paths tends to trivialize it even further. If you stab the guard it doesn't really mean anything, because you can just go back and not stab him. The problem is that players are merely acting (role-playing, in the strictest meaning of the word) and feel no responsibility for immoral actions: they're just having a look at the evil path, and next time they'll probably play as good to see the difference. Potentially amusing, but it doesn't really lead to any great moral dilemmas.
A lot of adventure games have done similar things in the past, too. The Pandora Directive and Blade Runner may be the most obvious ones. Is what you're attempting different from that?
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I haven't played those games in particular (though I have a copy of Blade Runner given to me that I still have yet to motivate myself to start), but from what I've seen of existing games that deal with morality, there usually tends to be one set of choices that is framed as resulting in a better outcome than all the others. In other words, there's a clear "good path" and "evil path" outlined by the game's designer, and "winning" the game doesn't entail thinking critically for oneself, but acting in accordance with the designer's wishes.
However, if you've been keeping up with the remainder of my articles, you'll notice that one of the main themes in this game is moral
relativism. Obviously, if I, as the designer, were to specifically outline actions as "good" and "evil" in a didactic fashion, "rewarding" the player if they did "good" and "punishing" them if they did "evil", that would cheapen the entire point I was trying to make in the first place. What I'm attempting to do instead is take a more-or-less morally neutral stance toward all actions, with my role being simply to provide meaningful dramatic consequences for such actions while allowing the players themselves to consider their ethical ramifications.
With the guard example, you automatically assumed that stabbing would be "evil" and convincing him to leave would be "good". I implied no such thing in my article, nor do I do so in the game; I only described a pair of actions and their consequences. You made the moral judgement (or at the very least, predicted
my moral stance on the matter) on your own, and in that regard, I may have already succeeded in my goal. But what if you took into account that the guard starts out being rather rude to you, and happens to be very irritating besides, what with his practically unintelligible Scottish accent and all? Furthermore, you know that killing the guard will piss off the Queen, but why would you even care, particularly considering that your
job is to assassinate her?
As for the whole being able to go back and do it over again thing, well, I think that's a major strength of our medium. Instead of forcing a person down one predetermined path, I think it's a lot more interesting to allow for the option to look at a few different sides of the same story. I don't really see how doing so fails to provide "sufficient satisfying gameplay". Also, when you say it could potentially be amusing but not earth-shatteringly unsettling, well, that's sort of my point. I'd like to make people think a bit, but I'd also like them to have some fun in the process, perhaps not even knowing that I'm making them think. That's exactly what many of my favourite stories do, after all.
Of course, all I'm saying is what I
hope to achieve, not necessarily what I
will achieve. I'll need to have some tester feedback once I've finished writing the game in order to make sure I'm communicating my goals effectively, but that's for another article. There's also the factor that I cannot be completely neutral in presenting the story I've created, as it's coloured by my own personal biases about the world. I predict that this might result in some people not liking
any of the choices or outcomes that I present to them, though I hope that I can find a balance in the end between listening to people whose opinions I respect for suggestions and acquiescing to the notion that you can't please all people all of the time. We shall see...
