Morality in the Mechanics

This is Game Maker's Toolkit, I'm Mark Brown. Darkest Dungeon shows the psychological toll of being a warrior in a Lovecraftian nightmare. Heroes become stressed out, they suffer debilitating afflictions, and they rack up destructive personality quirks. And while physical wounds heal instantly after a quest, psychological trauma lingers for much longer and must be treated with prayer, or booze, or a trip to the sanitarium.

It's a surprisingly nuanced representation of mental health - backed up by the yelps and appeals of your emotionally tortured party members - which makes your heroes feel like real and vulnerable humans. And this makes it so much worse when you, as their team leader, make the decision to crush their spirits, drive them to drink, push them way past their mental limits, and, when they've become too mentally broken to be useful anymore, toss them onto the streets.

Yes, it's important to take good care of your most valued troops, and you'll consider their emotional factors carefully. But it's also true that the only thing that's free in this game are human lives. A good strategy, then, is to hire a bunch of suckers for free, take them into a dungeon, and extinguish the torch. Fighting in the dark is incredibly stressful but it leads to much better loot. When the troops come back - haunted and suffering - you dismiss them and hire some more.

Darkest Dungeon ultimately makes you the bad guy, but it doesn't tell you that through the premise or as a twist in the story. You explore your morality organically, simply by engaging with the core mechanics on offer. As Jim Sterling wrote in his review, "you start having a much easier time the moment you stop thinking like a hero and start embracing the cold, calculated sociopathy of a would-be corporate CEO".

What you definitely do not need is one of those hokey karma systems to tell you that you've crossed onto the dark side. I'm not really talking about the ones found in RPGs like Mass Effect and Fallout, seeing as they stem from D&D character sheets that ask you which alignment you're going to role play as. But the ones found in action games like inFamous and BioShock are, to put it kindly, a bit crap. Choosing good or evil options simply leads to slightly different powers and cutscenes in inFamous, and while Irrational was going somewhere with the little sisters in BioShock, where you had to make the ethical decision to kill a child in order to get yourself more magic DNA juice, it bungled the execution by rewarding virtuous players with more stuff in the long run.

These systems are reductive, flattening out the complex maze of human morality into a single good or evil bar. And they frequently ignore the middle ground, and make it more about replay value than genuine heart-wrenching decisions. Which is why it's pleasing to see games like Darkest Dungeon, which is one of a number of recent indie games that explores this topic with a lot more nuance - mostly by doing away with separate "karma systems" altogether, and embedding morality into the main mechanics themselves.

Undertale, for example, turns every monster encounter into a moral choice as you can choose

to kill the critter, or talk to the monster and try to pacify it. Killing is easy - we've been taught how to do it by decades of JRPGs, after all - and this is the only way to receive experience points and boost your health. It's possible to justify your violent actions as coming from a place of fear and disempowerment. Mercy, on the other hand, is a complex puzzle - especially in boss fights - and because you receive no in-game bonuses for doing it, you'll have fewer health points and will struggle to defend yourself in upcoming encounters.

But Undertale's rewards for pacifism are far greater than stats: you become friends with the characters, you receive a more interesting story, and you get to go on a date with a skeleton. To be truly good in Undertale, you have to put in more effort, and make a significant sacrifice. And you also have to ask yourself what you value in video games because you get completely different things for choosing a more violent approach,or a more merciful play style.

Ultra depressing civilian survival game This War of Mine has more strict repercussions for immoral choices. If you direct a character to steal items or kill defenceless people when out scavenging, you will get more items for your safe house but you also risk making that character become sad, then depressed, and then broken. At which point they may leave your group or commit suicide. To restore that character's spirits, you'll have to spend time consoling them, or use up resources making alcohol. The consequences of your actions are felt keenly in this game.

And then there's Papers, Please. Here, you're tasked with checking passports as people cross the border into your country. If everything's legit, you let them through but if their passport is out of date or missing crucial information you turn them away. You earn money for every person you process, provided you make the right call, and at the end of the day you get to spend your money on food, medicine, and rent for your family.

Then, things start getting complicated. Every day new rules are introduced, extra paperwork must be checked, and it takes you longer and longer to process each person. Your rent's going up, your family's getting sick, and you're not making enough money each day. The odds are stacked against you, and the game starts to apply pressure. This guy will give you extra money if you detain people, even if they don't really deserve it. This man asks you to let his wife through, but she doesn't have the right paperwork and you could lose money if you don't turn her away.

In this game, the idea of right and wrong becomes very blurry. Papers, Please is mired in the murky grey area - and it essentially forces you to become corrupt. It's just down to you to decide the extent of that corruption. What I love about this game is that Papers, Please shows how good people don't just make an arbitrary choice to turn to be a bastard, but are instead driven to do immoral and cruel things by systemic failure, poverty, and desperation.

That's a pretty profound message in of itself, but video games are uniquely equipped to explore this topic because they aren't limited to just showing and telling: they make you complicit in the system. Darkest Dungeon, for example, may be making a comment on the way corporations can ignore the mental anguish of its employees just to make a profit - and it shows it to you first hand asking you to confront this nasty system.

Each of these games explores morality in its own way, but some similarities are clear. In each, you're tempted to be evil by the promise of money, experience points, or easier gameplay. And only This War of Mine seems to have a negative mechanical reaction to those who are immoral. It's much harder to be good in these games, as you must make sacrifices or make yourself vulnerable to do the right thing - and the rewards, if there are any, are often not about gameplay. They're narrative or character driven.

And these games all do a terrific job of making you feel miserably guilty for being a jerk, as characters and the world in general react to your misdeeds. I genuinely felt like human garbage when this woman was weeping over the corpse of her husband. Who I had just punched to death. Sorry. And most importantly, I think, is that all these games explore and comment on morality through their core mechanics, rather than in isolated choice sequences or separate karma systems.

In Undertale it's tied to experience points and combat. In This War of Mine it permeates looting and character moods. And in Papers, Please, decisions impact your budget, and are made with that big rubber stamp. Morality is something that more video games should touch on, if only because their participatory nature makes them the perfect medium for asking tough and uncomfortable questions of ourselves. But these games prove that it can be a lot smarter than simply choosing between the nice blue option and the evil red option.

Thanks so much for watching. Please leave a comment with your thoughts, or with more examples of how games can talk about morality in interesting ways. I try to read every single comment I get. As always, Game Maker's Toolkit is funded exclusively by its fans, including these gold tier supporters...