Taking consequences in games
In recent news there have been talk about the lack of consequences in games in general. There are very few moments in gaming history where your desicion acctually makes a huge difference and change the gameplay ahead (while there are desicions, there is often only one real option that advances gameplay).
While examples such as BioWares “Mass Effect” where certain decisions change the way the game playout are hard to find BioWare themselves state that they will bring consequences back in their upcoming Star Wars MMO. In traditional games you can often save the game at a point just before a major decision is made and thereby go back and change the choice if you ever regret it, in MMOs you rarely (if ever) can save your progress as all is happning continously in an on-line world. This puts the use of consequences to the test since a player needs to be able to “feel” all those decisions as they should be interpreted in the game. If a player recieves a quest to go chop someones head off he will most likely go chop someones head off without ever contemplating if that is a really good idea to do or not.
In other news the develops from Fallout 3 says they’ve restricted the gamers from being able to kill children in the game as they do not believe it’s something a player should be able to do. With school shootings in several countries this might be a very responsible choice from the developers but it really just walks around the larger issue of lack of consequence. What if you could do whatever you wanted in the game, but that some actions just carry a too high a price for your character or gameplay.
There are other games where the killing of some innocent characters have been restricted, in Blizzard’s World of Warcraft for example there are children that cannot be killed even by the opposing faction. This restriction have instead made people do put in extraordinary effort into killing a “non-killable” character, like draging a huge dragon from the other side of the planet into a major city just to see those “immune” characters suffer. This sort of behaviour is of course considered highly inappropriate by the game masters (Blizzards empolyees who act as “police” in the game) and if you are ever found doing such “game breaking” behaviour you risc being banned. Again, what the world lacks is consequence, if either you draged a huge dragon into the city or killed a child for that matter there should be some kind of penalty for your character but there is not!
Then again… this is games we are talking about, should we restrict games? “World of Warcraft” have some 10 million active players, I very much doubt “World of Consequence” would have the same.
Tags: Consequence, Design, Game, Game design, MMO, moral, values