"You're Just Gonna Be Nice": How Players Engage with Moral Choice Systems

by Amanda Lange

Abstract

Some data available from games with moral decision systems show that gamers are generally unwilling to play as evil characters. In a study, over 1000 gamers were surveyed to see how the average player interacts with a game system that allows the player to choose a "good" or "evil" path through a game story. The finding was that the average gamer prefers to be good or heroic in such games. Gamers are most interested in exploring a character whose moral choices closely match to their own. However, those players that experience a game for the second time are then more likely to choose evil. The article includes an exploration of which actions gamers felt particularly evil, and what kind of choices turn out to be more difficult for them.

My prediction is: all you guys, you’re just gonna be nice. Sickeningly, sycophantically nice to each other. And it makes me sick, because you know, in a game like Fable, we spent hours; we spent months, months and years crafting the evil side of Fable, and only ten percent of people actually did the evil side. Come on. You’re supposed to be gamers. (Peter Molyneux, 2013)

I am the ten percent.

And I find myself frustrated in conversations with gamers with similar tastes to mine in their absence of moral imagination. I know I am not my avatar in the game, so I like to experiment. Sometimes it's entertaining to me to see the results of a choice I would never make in reality. Sometimes it's just plain fun to be the bad guy. But it seemed to me that many other gamers I have spoken with have no interest in transgressing moral boundaries in story-based gaming. Their aversion to this, though I find it boring, poses some interesting questions for game designers.

A binary moral choice system has achieved a great deal of popularity in game design over the past decade. In the game Fable (Big Blue Box, 2004), as described above, there are certain segments based on player choice. The player may choose to do an explicitly labeled evil act, decreasing the in-game karma score of the player’s avatar, or a good act, which causes the character to gain in-game karma and become more heroic. This kind of system has appeared in different forms in game franchises, such as Mass Effect, inFamous, BioShock, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Fallout. Other games, such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios, 2011) or Dragon Age, contained moral-decision elements that are labeled by character traits or present branching narrative without an overt karma score. Still other games, such as Spec Ops: the Line (Yager Development, 2012), contained hidden moral decisions that ask the player to commit an act in the heat of a moment. The avatar may then be considered more good, or more evil, based on the game’s judgment.

Though all games seem to define good and evil slightly differently, most games are explicit about indicating which choice was made after it was made or during that choice’s execution. A few judgments are common. Games generally consider non-violent solutions to be good solutions when they are available, and consider overtly violent solutions to be evil regardless of the context or amount of violence elsewhere in the game. Creating wanton property damage or subjugating people is evil, advocating freedom is seen as generally good, and the promotion of social equality and justice are considered good. Betrayal of former friends is considered an evil act, as is ignoring the pleas of an innocent when something can be done to help them. Games seem to generally consider actions done with a pure profit motive to be evil, but they may reward actions done altruistically in such a way that, while the roleplayed character has no profit motive, the player still makes an in-game profit on the good act. In these situations, the player is rewarded for an avatar's supposedly selfless behavior. The Project Horseshoe Think Tank referred to these choice moments as "ethical dilemmas" and did a broader set of case studies about how they are typically presented in games, including examining games not frequently considered as moral choice games and tracking how those games presented and "scored" such dilemmas (Schreiber et al., 2009).

The Status Quo

We already have some statistics for how players engage with these elements, through data-mining of the games directly. Molyneux (2013) claimed ten percent played evil in Fable. The Mass Effect 3 (BioWare, 2012) team reported a third of players chose Renegade (evil-flavored) versus two-thirds Paragon (good-flavored) (Totilo, 2013). The recent zombie adventure series, The Walking Dead (Telltale Games, 2012), not only tracked how many people made which decision in which branch, but also displayed this to players in a series of video trailers (Fogel, 2012).

However, there are a few things that I felt current data mining couldn’t adequately express. For example, a common sentiment among gamers in a game that can be played as good or evil is to play good in the first playthrough. Evil is held for a second, lower-priority playthrough after they’ve played the game “correctly.” Having total statistics does not take this propensity into account.

I was also interested in seeing how moral choices correlated with the player’s and avatar’s gender. Based on earlier research from Heidi McDonald (2013) about identity tourism in games, I already suspected that male gamers would be more likely than female gamers to choose an avatar different from their own gender. Her research also showed that even though women were more likely to create an avatar that looked like them, they were not as likely to play out that avatar’s romantic choices the same way they felt they would in real life. I wondered if this could be applied to moral choices as well. My hypothesis based on available data was that only a minority of male gamers would choose the evil path in a moral-choice game. I also expected that there would be a correlation with a female avatar and the evil path, since many gamers also switch genders on a second playthrough. I wondered if there might also be a correlation between female players and evil: If women are more likely to choose a dangerous romance in a game, are they also more likely to make darker moral choices?

The Study

Over the past few months I’ve been conducting a survey of video gamers, asking them how they approach this type of choice in video games. Participants were recruited via Twitter, a Reddit community dedicated to video games, and a news post to a games and game-culture blog. A total of 1067 gamers responded to this survey. In the survey, I asked different questions depending on if the gamers reported they only played a game once, or if they liked to play the games more than once. The questionnaire also asked if players ever played avatars that had different gender identities than their own, and whether they played a different gender in their main or secondary playthroughs.

The questionnaire also had open-ended questions about how players interpreted moral choices in games. I was particularly curious about which acts players felt were too evil or made them feel guilty. Did players feel more rewarded playing heroically, or villainously?

These results should be interpreted cautiously. This was an exploratory study with a self-selected sample that may not be representative of the broader gaming environment. Probably the biggest flaw in this first study is that some people didn’t know what kind of games this survey was asking about, so they were unable to fully complete the survey. I purposely did not lead with the titles of any particular games, hoping those who responded would draw their own conclusions about which games included a moral choice system. In the future, I may focus on particular games or types of choices. Respondents were also 88 percent male, 10 percent female, with the remainder choosing “other” or electing not to respond. Based on this demographic it’s hard to draw too many conclusions about how women engage with these games. Sampling of data from spaces populated by a higher percent of female gamers may be necessary in a future study.

Factors such as game skill and familiarity may also influence the choices that players make in games. This study did not screen for players' level of familiarity with games or ask about their favorite types of games. In a future study, gamers might be sorted based on their familiarity with games to see how this alters the data set.

Only 1 percent of responders claimed not to complete the games they played. This is obviously skewed, since statistically, most gamers do not complete games they play. Industry averages may be as low as ten percent for a very large game, such as Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar San Diego, 2010; Snow, 2011), or, for example, 42 percent of players of the aforementioned Mass Effect 3 (Phillips, 2012). Seeing this result on the survey may mean that a higher amount of people likely to respond to the survey are the sort of players that always finish games. Of these gamers surveyed, 60 percent claimed they play such a game more than once. That leaves 39 percent that claimed to only play the game once. Industry data-mining does not usually track or report replays, so it's difficult to say how close this matches the average gamer.

The One-Timers

39 percent of survey participants claimed to typically play a game only once. Within that subset of players, 59 percent of participants played the game as a good character. 39 percent of those who played the game only once did not expressly play good or evil, but claimed to make decisions “on a choice by choice basis.” Five percent of participants played only evil. A majority of these participants (55 percent) said that they “usually” tried to really do in the game what they would actually do in real life. An additional 10 percent said they “always” did in the game what they would in real life, and 23 percent answered “sometimes.”

Figure 1: The “Play only once” condition for moral choices.

