Build your own morality

I finally finished Dragon Age II last night, after exactly three weeks of on-again/off-again play.

I’ve had a couple of gamers, whose opinions I trust, tell me that they find the Mass Effect series to be far superior to the Dragon Age series – both Bioware RPGs. I like both, but I connect with Dragon Age more for some reason that I’m not particularly concerned with understanding.

For the purposes of this blog, the important thing to note is that the story of Dragon Age II had a real significance for me. That’s not always the case with games I play.

Video games are increasingly about choice. Typically those choices are couched in narrative: if you choose path X over path Y, the narrative will proceed in an X-like manner. But in a lot of games, those decisions have gameplay consequences as well: if you choose path X over path Y, you get to play with the Flaming Sword of Insulting Fire rather than the Icy Sword of Frostbitten Stares.

In some cases, those consequences aren’t necessarily 1/2 but, rather, 1/0, where a particular choice either leads to some sort of new gameplay experience or it doesn’t. In those cases, being the completionist that I am, I almost always pick the 1. I’d rather add that resulting experience than not.

But, by the end of Dragon Age II, I was actively making 0 decisions – not because I was ready to get the game over with, which I wasn’t, but because those 0 gameplay results also lead to narrative results that I found meaningful, preferable, and – in a couple of different ways – right. They seemed not only the right decisions for the character that I’d been cultivating but also the right moral decisions.

(In short, one group was trying to restrict the freedom of another group, something I’m ordinarily against, and my character had the ability to echo my stance.)

Many modern RPGs have some sort of morality system, but they’re usually just another game to play to me: a set of strategic choices made to win the most good. But in Dragon Age II – and a select few other games – I felt like my own personal morality was in play. I think that's a good direction for games to take.

Question of the Week:

How much do the stories of video games matter to you? And/or what’s the best video game story you’ve ever heard/played/watched?

My take: It would seem like they matter a lot to me, but most are forgettable, so the average is probably something more like six of ten. And the first Bioshock provided a story that really stuck out to me.