TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL?

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Something quite interesting happened to me a few days ago. A few days ago, I refused to intervene to save a dying man and left him to his fate. His family cursed me horribly, my own brother was appalled at my decision, and, to be honest, it wasn’t an easy decision to make. Luckily, it was only in a game.

Bioware’s epic fantasy role playing game Dragon Age 2, in the best traditions of the genre, puts you in the position of having to make hard choices. And, while some purists may criticise the game for having a dumbed-down role-playing system compared to its spiritual ancestors based on the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons ruleset, nobody can deny that the emotional shades of grey in the storytelling of Dragon Age 2 are top notch (along with Bioware’s other flagship RPG series, Mass Effect, it is arguably the finest in contemporary gaming).

With both the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series, Bioware has pushed the decision-making element of the narrative far beyond the simple ‘good, evil or neutral’ decision tree that has been the norm in the past. In these games, decisions are never easy to make, often featuring several layers of subtlety, and multiple kinds of impact later on in the game. You never know whom to trust, who is right and who is wrong, and what effect your decisions as the game unfolds. It’s all rather skillfully done, and makes for some truly immersive roleplaying—where the player feels even more like they are influencing events in a large and complex world.

Thanks to this increased complexity of the moral and ethical landscape within which you have to make choices in the game, I found that I was thinking much harder about my in-game decisions, and discovered a bit about my own growth as a person as well. Sounds ridiculous? Bear with me a moment.

In the days of the great computer roleplaying game revival heralded by Baldur’s Gate, I would find it pretty hard to play as an ‘evil’ character, or even take an obviously ‘evil’ decision when playing as a neutral character.

I vividly remember a moment when I was playing Fallout, when I walked up to a random farmer and, trying to be evil, began shooting at him. He went down on his knees and begged for mercy, saying “Please! I have children!” And guess what? I couldn’t do it. I quietly reloaded an earlier game, and completed it as a paragon of virtue. That moment left such an impression on my mind that I have never played a role-playing game as an evil character again.

However, with Dragon Age and Mass Effect, something changed. I find that I don’t always trust people the game portrays as ‘good’, I find myself sometimes sympathising with the ‘evil’ characters, and I am often willing to let innocents die for the cause of the greater good.

While this can partly be attributed to deeper, more complex storytelling on the part of the developers, it is also greatly reflects how I think in real life today. Typically, when we’re younger, we tend to see things in black and white. We believe that the line between good and evil is straight, clear and well-defined. We are quick to decide between right and wrong. However, with the mellowing brought on by age and experience, these lines begin to blur. We tend to look for the other side of the story, to look beyond the obvious for hidden agendas, deeper meanings and motivations, unseen angles and the like.

Speaking for myself, I can clearly see this in how I react to events and situations in roleplaying games, which tend to have more complex and layered narratives than other genres. RPGs present you with moral and ethical dilemmas where you have to try and solve ingame problems that affect outcomes in the game which are not clearly foreshadowed to the player—you must take the decisions first and then deal with their fallout. Today, I ponder over these decisions far more than I did many years ago. And, interestingly, I don’t reload an earlier save when I find that one of my decisions has had some undesirable effects in my gameworld—I simply live with the consequences and continue, either choosing to live with the burden of having made mistakes, or looking for ways to set things rights. Eerily similar to real life, yes?

Today, when playing a really deep and interesting RPG, I sometimes feel like I’m putting myself into some sort of lab test and observing my own thought processes, value systems and priorities. As I play through Dragon Age 2, I often stop for a moment to step outside the gameworld and think—about why I played a particular situation in a particular way, and what this teaches me about myself. It’s fascinating, maybe even useful.

I can’t help thinking how, if regular commercial games can make us reflect and think about ourselves, the potential for the medium as a psychological learning tool must be immense. Ultimately, games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, however complex or deep their interactive narrative appears, are merely devices meant primarily to entertain. The apparent moral or ethical choices players have to make in the game are limited—Should I kill this character or let him live? Should I take sides with the government or the rebels? Should I return the treasure to the rightful owner, distribute it to the poor villagers, or keep it for myself? And yet they are capable of stimulating the mind of more sensitive gamers, making them reflect and ponder about things larger than the game itself.

Surely more complex narrative structures with simulated outcomes as opposed to the present canned, branching outcomes and more organic and varied choices given to players can be capable of being even more thought provoking? In the same way that truly great movies and books make us think about issues beyond the scope of their narratives, games like this can move us similarly. I’d like to think that, while most fiction in other media make us reflect on the outside world, games can be uniquely powerful in making us think about the inner workings of our minds, our very selves.

A future where game narratives function as deeper and richer simulated systems where the gameworld and characters respond organically to player choices is a delicious prospect—and it will be roleplaying games that will inevitably drive this. All role players essentially want to be an actor in a fantasy world, where they get to play a real part in influencing how the story plays out. And while present role-playing games offer us the illusion of doing just that, truly reactive narratives are perhaps closer than we think. And once that happens, roleplaying games will function as a narrative medium that makes us think deeply about who we are and what drives us.