“Moral Choice” Video Games Simulate Kindness Without Personal Risk

Kindness has come to be seen as a great weakness: sentiments sprout abundant about “nice guys finishing last” in a fast paced and cold modern world. You won’t get anywhere being nice. Never do something nice for free. You’ve gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette. Always look out for number one. Be savage. Don’t let people take advantage of your kindness. Colloquially, we’ve developed a million ways to warn others that kindness is a disadvantage.

Humankind addresses the question of kindness from every angle, layman to academic, religious to political, personal to global. We’re more often than not to find that, in every medium we have to explore the world, we have made some sort of statement struggling with the nebulous concept of doing good unto others, and whether or not doing good is a good idea for our own self-preservation. While video games are not all carefully crafted, artistic, supercilious thought experiments meant to philosophically challenge us at every angle (nor should they need to be for a few good games to be truly considered “art”) even our most mindless and carefree games have something to provide anew to the complicated dialogue surrounding humanity and altruism.

A broad sampling of the RPG format produces many games featuring “Good and Evil” meters: mechanics that allow players to feel like they’re making a choice in their character’s story, shaping that character’s morality, adding another layer to imbue games with the illusion of self-directed choice and open-ended possibilities. For example, Giantbomb has nearly 500 games listed under the concept “Moral Decisions” — offering evidence to the claim that there are plenty of games tackling the idea of choosing between good and bad (and even deducing our own moral judgements through video games as a medium). These games give us a measured binary between good and evil, but also frequently ask us in their narratives whether or not our motivation for that choice is good enough, testing whether we stand by the reasoning that supports our moral decision.

Games that make us question if we said or did the right thing aren’t rare, and can engage our moral reasoning without the player outright rejecting it for challenging our ideas of right and wrong.

Defunct narrative video games mogul Telltale Games in particular developed a quiet yet impactful way of making people reevaluate whether their moral decision was the “right” one, letting the player know that the set characters “will remember that”. The genre of games incorporating the Good/Evil choice mechanic is not always tactful — occasionally bashing you over the head with manufactured drama — and there are insurmountable accounts of video games with entirely stupid or pointless moral choices. Nevertheless, gaming as a hobby is not an amoral playground of guns and violence, even though gamers are still accustomed to having their habits blamed for any number of societal and behavioural ills — laziness, gun violence, sociopathy, obesity, to name just a few.

I am not about to tackle whether or not you are a good person, or how gaming as a hobby influences your behaviour. You are not about to be told that as someone who plays games we should just put you on a school shooter watch-list because gamers are immoral dangerous chodes, lacking any sense of kindness, who can’t tell right from wrong or reality from fiction. You can let go of that defensive tension building in your shoulders. As someone who has taken the “evil” route in choice-pivotal games as often as the “good” route, it would be hypocritical to turn around and say “well, we’re all actually a little evil because we blew up a make-believe city, killed an orphan just because the game let us, or cheated on our digital spouse” (I do think the people who call all “good” routes in video games boring/bad/lame might have a hard time feeling comfortable expressing kindness, but it doesn’t mean they don’t or can’t express it in their everyday lives). Those evil stories are written to be experienced by generally good people, people who would never actually do these evil things in real life but are able to experience a simulation of such in the safe confines of digital fiction.

Just as much as these interactions provide us with the freedom to do evil without real-world repercussions, so too do they offer us the ability to be good without repercussions. In a world where we constantly warn each other about not being too soft, too kind, too easily manipulated, video games give you the freedom to be all of those things and come out the other side unscathed.

Games where you get to make moral choices that decide the fate of “immoral” characters are an interesting reflection of this. Being able to forgive a dangerous or “evil” person in hopes that they can turn their life around, repent, and become a better person is hard to do without fear that your trust and kindness will be taken for granted. In a video game, whether or not a hardened criminal we absolve of their sins with our forgiveness become a saint, or just end up stabbing us in the back, we can always reload or restart. Taking a chance on someone the narrative tells us has the power or incentive to harm us is only dangerous for our character and not dangerous for our real world selves. As such, a video game that lets the player choose to do good when they aren’t certain it will work out for them provide a form of wish fulfillment or power fantasy — the power to be forgiving.

Sometimes games even offer us the opportunity to form close bonds with former ruthless assassins, thieves, and betrayers — wanna kiss a killer?

We might be inclined to believe that the only kind of wish fulfillment provided is the player’s ability to punish an immoral character for their wrongdoings, or exact vengeance on an NPC in some way: a power fantasy that seems especially appealing when you work a customer service job and you have to let people step all over you because they’re the source of your paycheck. Video games often provide their protagonists with the strength and privilege to burn their enemies, crumble them to piles of sad grey ash, and then move on without ever being held responsible for exacting a quick and swift vengeance. I’ve played games where I was allowed to murder a guy just because he said some mean things to my protagonist at a party, and then we just continued diplomatic pleasantries as if a man’s body was not crystallized and obliterated to high heaven but moments ago. Needless to say, games with morality meters are littered with options to be an unforgiving force of destruction.

Of course there is the other option: the Good route. Being able to forgive a “bad” character in video games — to save them in a moment of weakness, or do something compassionate for them — usually ends up with that NPC becoming a better person or learning from their mistakes. When you choose to help the bad guy in a video game, there are a lot of instances where they even become an ally and their plot development is related to rehabilitation, learning to move past their mistakes. Hurtful characters undergo lightspeed recoveries, crash courses in empathy that send them straight back on the narrow path of heroism and bravery. When they don’t — when they remain evil, or dickish, or a deranged murderer — it’s usually not the end of the world for your character. Most protagonists make it out of their game alive.

This is pretty different from real life, where it can take years for an abusive person to change their habits, if they choose to at all. It can take multiple people intervening in an abuser’s life before they even notice there is a problem in the first place, and during that time they might continue to abuse those who attempt to offer moral redirection. We write redemption arcs for horrible characters because that fiction — that an act of kindness extended to a hurtful person is guaranteed to make them kinder in turn — makes us feel just as powerful and in control of our reality as burning a dude to a crisp because he insulted you, or implied you had a tiny penis.

This forgive-and-heal dynamic that pops up in games everywhere allows the player to live out a fantasy where it’s easier to forgive someone who has caused immeasurable pain, and see them become rehabilitated soon after. In an ideal world, abusers would become better people without the threat of punishment. In video games, we can simulate that peaceful, simple world, if just for a moment — even in games where the story doesn’t provide our forgiven characters with a happy ending. Even if the “immoral” character doesn’t eventually become an ally or a “good guy”, we’re still making these choices at a distance, from the comfort of our side of the screen, where we can’t really be hurt by them.

Redemption stories in video games can have unhappy endings as often as they have happy ones, but you can still trust that things will all work out in the end without being personally harmed if/when they don’t.

A lot of people seem to think that moral choice games, and games that tackle moral binaries in general, are only good for getting to play out the “evil” side of things. These stories are easily greater than that, for they serve as a playground where we are free to act out unconditional kindness. In life, you don’t always get to care without being hurt, or being immediately warned that your kindness will get you hurt. That’s what’s special — and possibly even therapeutic — about moral challenges in video games.

We can love and forgive with abandon in fantasy worlds.