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Karmic Imbalance: The Morality Problem in
Video Games
By Cody McElhinny
When I first played Fallout 3 in 2010, I was struck by the degree of agency I was granted as a player. Upon leaving the starting area of Vault 101, the post-apocalyptic Washington D. C. felt entirely at my disposal. In some aspects, it really was. I could venture to every visible corner of the game world, all the while ignoring my quests and exploring a world of my own accord. Despite this freedom, which was admittedly enjoyable, I had one overarching qualm with the game. Nothing within its fictional world truly felt at stake. Regardless of my actions, I was approaching a predetermined end. Fallout 3 lacks what many games do: a“ moral texture”, a sense that all actions and choices have meaningful consequences.
In Fallout 3, your choices as the player are morally simplified: either act the role of an upstanding hero or a heartless villain. Given these starkly defined parameters, I found it nearly impossible to commit bad deeds because, more often than not, those deeds were so unequivocally horrible. Take, for example, a Fallout 3 quest titled“ The Power of Atom”, which presents you with the choice of either disarming a nuclear bomb or detonating it, wiping out an entire city and all its inhabitants. In a moment such as this, moral ambiguity is thrown out the window and morality is represented as black and white; either you commit mass murder or you don’ t. Saving the city will award you good karma points whereas destroying it will award you with bad karma points. Throughout Fallout 3 the game tracks your overall karma and, upon reaching certain thresholds, grants the player access to rewards, bonuses, and new interactions.
From a narrative standpoint, morality mechanics such as Fallout 3’ s karma system are failures in game design for several reasons. First and foremost, they imply that the morality within the game’ s universe is a binary concept; there is only good and evil and nothing exists in-between. Secondly, rewarding players for- consistent good or bad behavior may discourage that player making a choice they morally align with. A player might adopt an“ evil” playstyle simply because it reaps the most in-game benefits. When the player makes a choice based on factors that are external to that choice, consequences become secondary. And finally, this lack of a moral texture detracts from characterization. On one hand, the player character might end up devolving into a bland, archetypical role( i. e. a hero or a villain). On the other, the nature of the player’ s choices might vary so much that any semblance of a coherent character is lost. In Fallout 3, perhaps the player might choose to detonate the nuke and then, immediately after, lead an effort to free enslaved wastelanders from a group of raiders.
Karma in Fallout 3 gives a false sense of consequence, but in reality it is boiled down to a simple statistic. When the player makes a choice, the game determines for them the moral integrity of that choice by indicating a rise or fall in karma. There is no room
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