I’ve been trying to write this article for weeks, but I’m actually glad I waited.

See, what I want to talk about is morality and choice in games, which is a topic I’m sure many of you think has been analyzed to death; while I agree to an extent, I think it’s interesting to periodically come back and examine the progress (or lack thereof) games are making in this regard by checking out how specific titles fare.  The reason I’m glad I held off is that I originally had two relatively recent games in mind to feature: Catherine and inFAMOUS 2.  Since my initial idea, though, I’ve played all the way through Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and it definitely deserves a place here as well.

The way I see it, the major problems with how most games end up incorporating a “morality scale” all circle around the fact that once a game has decided to have one, ambiguity goes straight out the window.  The scale never has dimensions; instead, it has poles. It’s a straight line. In games like Fallout 3, Mass Effect, and Knights of the Old Republic, just to name a few, your character’s choices inevitably push him or her toward one end of the completely linear spectrum: higher or lower karma? Paragon or Renegade? Light Side or Dark Side? Rarely if ever will you be presented with a choice that has elements of both, and if you are, you may be assured that it won’t have a perceptible impact on the storyline, or indeed, on the development of your character.

Catherine and inFAMOUS 2 fall right into the trap set by these earlier titles.  Catherine‘s protagonist, Vincent, makes choices about his situation–dealing with balancing Katherine, his girlfriend, and Catherine, his illicit fling–that each send his inner moral compass towards either a tiny angel or a tiny devil on the screen.  It hardly takes a symbologist to figure out what that means.  inFAMOUS 2, like its predecessor, allows main character Cole McGrath to breeze through his story in either a heroic way or (appropriately enough) in an “infamous” way.  Once again, the side missions he chooses, the partners he allies with, and the solutions he chooses to deal with obstacles either push him to one end of the scale or the other, but never display elements of both.

Since the scales themselves tend towards polarity, it makes sense that the decisions characters make on their journeys display the same characteristics.  Sometimes, though, it simply gets downright ridiculous.  I’m thinking in particular here of many of the side missions in inFAMOUS 2; as Cole roams around New Marais, he is presented with seemingly constant opportunities to move that karmic needle in the direction of his choice.  While walking/jumping/gliding down any given street, he may spot a bomb to be defused or a citizen to be saved from a mugging; he may also encounter a street musician to be executed, or a group of protesters to be silenced.  I’ll bet you can’t guess which karma goes with which situations, because they’re so terribly subtle.

Catherine actually does display a bit less heavy-handedness in this regard; yes, you do have the opportunity to pore over mostly-nude photos of your young blonde paramour while ignoring your pregnant girlfriend’s phone calls, but there are also some more subtle decisions presented along the way. In between the nightly dungeons Vincent must traverse, he is asked a series of mostly relationship-centered questions by a mysterious voice.  Not only do the answers affect the aforementioned morality scale, they are also posted online so that you can compare your own responses to those of other players.  It’s an interesting twist that forces the player to consider how he or she wants to be represented in this regard, or even if such things are worth worrying about–is it more important to have your own opinions accurately recorded, or is Vincent’s opinion the only one that matters? Are they the same?  Either way, these questions tend to be a bit less black-and-white, as you may discover through the range of responses given by the community.

The biggest problem I’ve found with morality-based gameplay, however, is that players who make an effort to be balanced–or sometimes even those who simply attempt to be honest–are frequently punished by being denied access to the best abilities, the best storylines, the best endings, and so forth.  inFAMOUS 2 is a particular offender here; without driving Cole all the way to one end or another of the karma scale, the most powerful abilities remain out of reach.  In both inFAMOUS 2 and Catherine, the ending that you receive depends on your position on the morality scale of each respective game.  In Catherine, particularly, Vincent’s ultimate fate can take one of eight forms, but the “best” ending can only be viewed if his moral scale is all the way in the blue (another trait shared by many games of this type is that blue denotes “good” and red “bad”… but that’s a topic for another time).  Any shifts one way or the other result in something different.  inFAMOUS 2 has only two endings, but again, they only take into account how your morality meter ends up; nothing else matters.

I said when I started this article that I was glad I’d waited to write it until after I finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but you’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned the game yet.  In fact, if you’ve played the game yourself, you may be wondering why I was so keen to include it here, since it doesn’t actually feature a morality system.

Well, no. It doesn’t. That’s sort of the point.

In Deus Ex, protagonist Adam Jensen makes precisely the same sorts of tough decisions as, say, Commander Shepard might in Mass Effect; in fact, I’d argue that Jensen’s are often tougher, because due to the omission of an actual morality system, Jensen’s choices don’t always have to point to a “good” or “bad” outcome.  There are consequences, certainly, but Deus Ex is far more likely than other games of its ilk to allow the player to decide which actions better suit their character and their circumstances without having to worry about how Jensen’s karma or reputation might be affected. A choice is simply a choice on its own, without cumulative effects, at least not of the sort that can be measured on a sliding scale.

Consider the following example (unless you haven’t finished Deus Ex and don’t want the side missions spoiled, in which case, skip the rest of this paragraph): midway through the game, you can accept a side mission from a doctor at a LIMB clinic, who enlists you to stop a rogue ex-security operative and his team. When you track down the operative, Michael Zelazny, you find that he and his men have been augmented and used by corrupt governmental officials for horrible missions, then altered further to ensure that they wouldn’t remember the missions. Upon discovering this, Zelazny and his men obtain a list of those involved in this sickening operation and set out to destroy them, one by one.  As Jensen, you then have a choice: kill Zelazny and his team, as the doctor has asked of you, or look the other way and allow them to continue their plans to punish those responsible.

Either way, people die, and people live who arguably shouldn’t.  But who are you to make that call?  Who is Jensen?  There is no clear-cut answer to this, and that’s why I believe that the way Deus Ex handles morality — by opting to color its choices in shades of grey rather than in black and white — is the only realistic way to proceed, and the way I’d like to see more games tackle the problem in the future.  Choices and consequences stemming from those choices are a great way to involve and immerse the player in a game world, but making those choices count as more than moving a needle one way or the other on a blue and red scale is something that too many games have yet to master.