Rantings: Doing My Good Deed

This discussion actually starts with a review. A few weeks ago, I completed the game Iji for about the fourth time. You may not have heard of this game, and I'd understand, because it's a completely free indie game available, as far as I know, only on computers. Iji is basically a 2-D shooting/action game. You play as Iji, a hapless girl who survived a planetary attack by aliens and turned into a combat-capable cyborg to fight them off. You run around through ten levels, fighting or evading aliens with the occasional boss fight. So far, it's pretty standard. It has plenty of appealing features, including well-animated if simplified characters, an excellent soundtrack, three secrets per level, and RPG-elements like gaining experience and using it to customize your character by improving your maximum health, attack strength, weapons you can carry, and more unusual abilities like strength to kick down stronger doors and larger enemies.

But what really caught my attention in the game were the story and the control you have over it. The game is both incredibly detailed and gritty to an almost nihilistic point. The detail comes from the conversations and the motivations of enemies. Even the final boss is a flawed but relatable figure, earning sympathy despite being responsible for countless deaths. In the meantime, as you progress through the game, you get logbooks from all sides of the enemy groups, from soldiers both in favor of and against their leaders to hackers and criminals seeking to exploit their own forces, to scared and desperate soldiers panicked about their own lives and those of their loved ones.

They also write about you. And these reports, along with the rest of the discussion, change based on your actions. And despite being a cybernetic super-soldier with a morphing weapon, you can happily avoid fights. In fact, if you deliberately avoid killing enough soldiers, you can attract allies among the enemy ranks, form nonviolence pacts, and even avoid entire boss fights! The game keeps track of all your kills, and if you follow a pacifism run, you can end up with zero kills at all. Well, you can end up with any direct kills, at least. Conversely, if you blow your way through every alien in your path, not only will the logbooks and conversation treat you as a murderous lunatic, but Iji herself will speaking differently. If you kills enemies in the beginning, she'll actually apologize to the enemies she kills, but this will stop with time, and eventually she'll start screaming at her foes and laughing at their deaths.

All of this contrasts nicely with a similarly-themed video game I recently played, Mirror's Edge, which I believe I already discussed. We have the same skilled heroine fighting against an evil empire, and in both cases while violence is an option, it's neither necessarily nor encouraged. Faith, a skilled parkour enthusiast, can steal guns from enemies and use them, but it slows her down immensely. And if you don't shoot any enemies (not counting a plot point where you have to shoot a truck with a sniper rifle,) you even get an achievement called Test of Faith.

But unlike Iji, it doesn't matter that much in the game. There is no real point in terms of the story. For one thing, death itself is not an issue. No, you don't have to shoot anyone, but kicking them off buildings where they fall to a horrible death is A-OK! That's even obligatory at one point in the game, where she does that to a villain via cut-scene. And the plot won't be affected by your actions either way. They same police will shoot you on sight regardless of how you treated them before, so barring some personal satisfaction all you're doing is making the game harder (and believe me, it makes a few places where you have to fight much harder.)

These two games illustrate a fairly recent gameplay feature called the "Karma Meter." In addition to simply playing to beat the game, the player can alter the flow of the game, or at minimum the ending, based on how good or bad a person you play as. What that entails is based on the game. In Mass Effect, you are a loyal marine out to save the galaxy no matter what the player chooses, and you can be either an idealistic "good cop" or an intimidating "bad cop." Fallout 3, conversely, lets you be a savior who rescues captives, wipes out entire towns of slavers, and sacrifices yourself for the good of others, or a horrible monster capable of blowing up entire cities for personal profit, murdering your childhood friend, EATING people, or enslaving children.

Am I a fan of this feature? Yes, in general, but it comes at a price. I believe I spoke of the range between linear storytelling and free-form, totally customized gameplay. Neither is bad, but the simple fact is that every branch of a linear story, that story can't be as concise. Letting the player choose, for example, to betray a friend at a crucial moment can have significant impact in both ways, but you just won't have as much time or development cost and space to plan each ensuing path as you could if one path was the only choice. But making excellent stories on both paths is viable. In three of my favorite ideas, one has a normal "bad ending" and a more complex "good ending" by accomplishing special tasks, another has branches towards good, evil, and simply crazy routes, and a third game potentially alter reality based on your actions so the events of the game are either a crusade to save the world or the hallucination of a psychopath.

But a good karma meter needs some standards. First of all, a karma meter needs to be sensible. Fallout 3 has that problem with a few choices. In one instance, killing a man who murdered an entire city full of innocents and is willing to destroy another town simply due to bigotry will result in...negative karma? The technical reason is the character was a more sympathetic one earlier and their karma state couldn't be changed afterward, but it breaks suspension of disbelief and makes the entire game's ethic system seem compromised. Even Iji has a few issues. Your pacifism run prevents you from killing anyone directly, but to accomplish it, you must set a trap that kills someone and help an ally kill another even though you don't fire that last shot. You can also kill people by indirectly sending vehicles or shrapnel at enemies or standing near other targets when an explosive attack flies at you, letting them be damaged by it as well.

The second standard is how much it affects the game if you stick to it. In Iji, the pacifism has almost no effect on the ending. At most a line or two changes, but the rest of the game shows the fruits of your action. Fallout 3 is another positive example. NPCs will comment based on your actions, and some characters will even give you free supplies. The main radio station in the game will also comment on how good or evil your actions were in their various missions and introduce you based on your overall good or evil rating.

The last standard is much harder and is tied to the system's complexity. If a system tracks just one thing, like your kill count, that's fine. But many systems track everything from thievery to murder on the same scale. Usually murder costs you more, but the results are still just numbers. You could go on a city-wide killing spree, and if you give pittance to a few beggars it might balance the scaled, even if you then kill that same beggar! Arguably, certain actions should knock you below maximum range and no actions should correct it, or at least only the noblest actions should correct it. But then what about reform? Can't even the darkest of people get the chance to make things right, at least in the escapism of a video game?

As the system gets more complicated, it requires more effort, but the rewards will be more than worth it. If you care enough to give the game the choices, you should give those choices the respect it deserves.