The Game Boy: Your Goodie Two-Shoes Jedi is Kind of a Jerk

Posted 05/13/2009 at 10:30am | by Nathan Grayson

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When they strap me to the chair, I won’t fight it.

The man was frail and frightened. All he could do was drop to the floor and beg for a quick death from his much more physically imposing enemy. And I gladly obliged. His name, when highlighted by my cursor, was red, after all. He was one of the bad guys, right? Right?

The above scenario occurred while I was playing through Fallout 3’s Broken Steel DLC, and would’ve been just another day in the Wasteland if not for a few key factors. First up, according to my Pip Boy, I’m Wasteland Jesus, doer of all things selfless and just, hands sparkly clean and free of innocent blood. Second, my enemy – a scientist – wasn’t the violent type. He ran without giving me any sort of trouble, yet I gave chase. I was the schoolyard bully, and he the undeserving nerd. Sure, his red name tag told me that perforating his fancy future lab coat wouldn’t yield any karmatic consequences, but I had no way of knowing if he was actually evil. But I still killed him and, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t the least bit sorry.

Really, what does such a scenario even say about the habits videogames foster in us? Sensationalists would, of course, say that this is just another example of the big, mean gaming industry’s trivialization of death, regarded by many as the de facto Serious Topic. To which I respectfully reply: You’re dumb.

If you take a few moments to sift through gaming’s ever-expanding walk of fame, you’ll quickly notice that many of our hobby’s biggest, most memorable stars and starlets are, well, dead. SPOILERS. Aeris (or Aerith, or whatever Square’s calling her these days) from Final Fantasy VII. The dog from Fable II. The baby metroid from Super Metroid. And my personal, though lesser known favorite: the random helicopter pilot from Resident Evil 4. In the cases of many of these deaths, players mourned for these characters, and even tried to – for the most part, unsuccessfully – bring them back to life. Gamers still experience death like everyone else. Game designers know that, and use it to make their games more emotionally affecting.

So why, then, are we still capable of callously capping “enemies” that can’t or won’t fight back? My guess? It’s that darn good vs. evil meter doodad so many new-fangled games present us with these days.

In today’s games, morality systems work like this: you do something that the game considers “good” or “evil,” and then the game tells you exactly how good or evil your action was. Whether you’re following in the footsteps of Gandhi or Steve Jobs, the game will give you an update every step of the way. As a result, the action you’re performing is deemphasized, while pleasing the whims of the almighty meter becomes your main goal. And really, that’s just disappointing, because games could be pulling this off so much better.