In a traditional narrative medium, moral choice often enters in when a character discovers they can do something that goes against their beliefs to gain some sort of an advantage or object of desire. The audience may perceive the character has other options which would benefit them as much or more without compromising their principles, but much of the time this irony just creates a narratively justifiable moral myopia for that character, furthering their characterization.
What happens when we try to apply the same formula to a game story? Since the player nominally control the character’s actions, this moral myopia begins to feel absurd and repressive rather than expressive. This is as much an opportunity as it is a problem: Character actions being constrained by their personality is a viable and interesting design space, but must be expressed carefully. As clumsy as the old Dungeons & Dragons alignment system is, it gets at something important: A character believes certain things and that constrains their actions – not necessarily by preventing them from making a choice but by constraining what things they even see as choices to be made. That is to say, for a ‘good’ aligned character it’s not that, when they have the choice to take the money and run or stay and do the job, they always make the correct choice: Often they don’t even perceive a choice to be made there at all.
While the player may control the character, this is not quite the same as them being the character: The inputs they provide are interpreted by the game before being used to control the character, and the information the character perceives is not necessarily complete or reliable. This layer of control and information abstraction between player and character is where the designer can intentionally express the character even as the player controls them. Through subtly limiting or reinterpreting player actions into character actions, or shaping the space to align with the character’s perceptions, the designer can make it so the option of breaking character is simply not present. Many games, for instance, have a separate set of actions for non-combat and combat zones, so rather than even worrying about what happens if you attack an NPC they just turn the attack button into the talk button whenever there’s someone around to talk to. By carefully constraining the environment and available player actions within it, the designer creates a space within which that character can be expressed, a set of lines for the player to color inside.
Where this usually goes extremely wrong is where it collides with the other set of player actions provided by the game – what one might consider the gameplay itself. The real difficulty in expressing any idea with moral weight in a video game is that most video games, and especially games with morality systems, tend to have the player play as a mass murderer and looter. This is a conflict most games have made a concerted decision to not give a shit about – which, I suppose, is a solution of sorts. Many such games aspire to Important and Consequential narrative, though, while being ultraviolent cartoons every moment that they’re not playing a melodramatic scripted film scene at you. In this context, good and evil decisions have to be so absurdly over the top to register over the background noise of mayhem that they seldom seem grounded in any meaningful way.
This is not to say that scripted scenes and moral choices can’t be emotionally affecting, but just that they’re almost a completely discrete piece of art from the game you’re playing the rest of the time, with very little actual relationship between them. There are effectively two ways to solve this issue: The first is to shift the narrative towards the gameplay, so your game that’s 90% mass murdering has a story about mass murder. This was part of why I found Hotline Miami exciting at the time, because this is at least a cogent solution – if perhaps one that gets quickly wearing on repetition. The other solution is to move the gameplay towards the narrative, which is trickier since that raises a lot of questions about what sorts of gameplay can fit the narrative, and these solutions can change dramatically on a case by case basis. Undertale does a very elegant job of sticking mostly to established schools of game design while also using those systems to express different characters and aspects of its story.
As things stand, it’s usually somewhat grotesque and absurd when games expect us to take their moral ponderings seriously. What is the moral weight of the player’s everyday actions? Do the game’s big choices or big reveals make any sense within that framework? Is this one game, or two games with a tenuous relationship, or a game with a film that you watch in bits and pieces between playing? I suppose there’s nothing wrong with any of these things – but, myself, I find it most interesting when all the pieces of the game seem to exist in the same world and speak the same language.