The inherent morality of gamers

So, many games let you play as a good guy or a bad guy. What do people prefer? Morality systems tend to be encourage fairly ridiculous extremes, but that doesn’t make the question uninteresting.  Stephen Totilo interviewed Brian Fleming who heads the studio that produced Infamous:

He’d heard this from Peter Molyneux, the outspoken head of Lionhead Studios, who said that players of the Xbox series “Fable,” tended to steer their characters toward the side of angels. Technically, they could have made their characters evil and gained just as many benefits. But Molyneux said players ultimately preferred to complete their adventure as a good person.

“I thought he was lying,” Fleming told me during a demo of “Infamous” last week in San Francisco. Then Fleming saw a survey, which indicated that gamers want to save the world, that as little as 20% of players of games like these finish evil…

Play-testing of “Infamous” has indicated to Fleming that many gamers don’t want to flip-flop their moral standing. “People blindly steer hard in one direction,” he said. I suggested that they did this in order to maximize their skills in the game’s good superpowers or evil superpowers. To balance that, he said, out-of-character actions in the game will net players double the standard experience points for the other moral path. A bad guy who does some good gets more credit than a good guy who just does more good. Such is life?

I like doubling the experience points for exceptions, but on the whole I generally think encouraging extremes makes for uninteresting morality.  If it’s a Star Wars game, I can see the logic, but I’ve always found the Dark Side/Light Side dynamic to hold fairly little insight into human nature.  Similarly, I really don’t have time these days to play through games twice so that aspect doesn’t appeal to me either.

I’d be happy to theorize about how to better have morality systems add depth, but I think the best way to start is to go where the players are.  Sure off the ridiculously bad options, but most of the effort should go towards the good side.  Apparently Infamous does offer variety on each side, although that part didn’t really show in the trailer.