Balancing in the Middle

For a while there was a trend of providing a moral choice to players: The choice between Good and Evil. My understanding is that this idea probably started with Ultima IV in 1985 – but when I think about “moral choice” in games, what I’m thinking about is the decade or so following the release of Fable in 2004. Every game for a while after had to have some moral choice: However, these choices were largely cartoonish and vapid, between baby-kissing and puppy-kicking, and frequently didn’t have any meaningful consequence beyond making your little man on screen look more demonic or angelic. Developers fairly quickly realized this was actually not very interesting, so they grew towards stories about warring factions instead: Two sides, locked in war, with the player caught in between – which more or less describes most games that release now, at least those which offer “meaningful choice” as a bullet point on the back of their virtual box. Within this framework, the developer has two choices: Either make one faction good and the other evil (in which case it’s only superficially different from Fable’s good/evil dichotomy), or make both factions complex, flawed, both questionable, both compromised.

A very important point that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle is that more nuanced is not necessarily more correct. History is full of warring factions and, while everyone has a reason to fight, it is not rare for one side’s reasons to be very stupid and greedy and the others entirely reasonable. The world is complex and morally gray – in totality. Most individual historical decisions, however, can be examined and called as they are: Either Dick Move or Fair Play. Perhaps Dick Moves might eventually lead to Fair Plays or Fair Plays lay the groundwork for future Dick Moves, but to mix all these together into featureless moral paste is an act of profound cynicism, ignorance, and cowardice. Defending yourself from brutal imperialism will simply never be an equivalent moral act to perpetrating that imperialism, and the logic that equates them because they’re both “violence” is an extremely dangerous one – but I digress.

So: We now have a structure with multiple factions, where we have constrained ourselves to keep them more or less even with each other in overall goodness and evilness, in the interests of “complex narrative” and “meaningful choice”. This is, to start with, actually completely unnecessary. One of the best examples of why is in Fallout: New Vegas: In New Vegas, there are a couple of strong factions – Caesar’s Legion and the New California Republic – trying to take over the territory, along with many weaker factions who currently live there and exist in a tenuous peace. The player can choose to side with either Caesar’s Legion or the NCR. The NCR is broadly analogous to the USA in methods, ambitions, and self-perception: An imperialist neoliberal democracy that’s aggressively trying to expand its territory eastward. Meanwhile, Caesar’s Legion are straight-up fascists complete with institutionalized slavery and misogyny. The NCR is bad, but Caesar’s Legion is inarguably worse – fortunately, while the player is allowed to choose between these factions, they certainly have other options, options which most players end up taking simply because playing by either NCR’s or Caesar’s rules usually becomes too onerous.

Curiously, despite New Vegas being generally the most well-regarded game in the Fallout series, most developers writing game scenarios with the player caught between factions still seem to strongly to try to make them all morally gray in relatively equal proportion. This gets pretty weird: Often one side is clearly in the right as regards the actual principle of conflict, but are just jerks when it comes to their approach and methods.

This results in some interesting outcomes when games approach saying anything of actual substance. If we have a structure where we have Faction A, a faction which has noble ideals but vile methods, and Faction B, which has vile ideals but honorable methods, who is going to get cast into these conflicting sides? Well, right-wing ideals are inherently pretty bad! Probably some people are interested in arguing this point: I’m not. Most of what motivates the right-wing at any given moment boils down to the supremacy of the rich, the white, and the male – you know, Caesar’s Legion shit. Given these immediately objectionable ideals, the left gets shoved into Faction A. Yet this creates a curious structure: Every time, because we are addicted to a moral complexity that doesn’t allow one side to be right, we create a narrative where the right (Faction B) may have bad ideals but are admirable people while the left (Faction A) may have noble ideals but constantly undermine them. This craving for “nuance” will, instead, with repeat iteration, end up systematically recreating the argument that leftist ideals are disingenuous and dangerous, and that they must be opposed by counterbalancing ideas. What was, perhaps, intended to be a certain sort of centrist even-handedness immediately dissolves into what is effectively a smear campaign – simply as an emergent property of avoiding “taking sides”!

Over time, as this and other channels of propaganda take effect, the perception of what counts as right or left shifts ever further to the right, and positioning a Faction A/B balance within this worldview serves to make ever-more-monstrous people appear more and more sympathetic, while making even moderately left organizations deeply and innately sinister.

Of course, there’s a lot else going on here. There has been an organized campaign to attack and undermine communism and other leftist ideologies for more than a century now, and most of the large companies backing popular media certainly have vested monetary interests in fighting against leftist policies. I just think it’s worth observing that, even absent specific forces vested in advancing these narratives, this overall propagandistic message is generated simply through the narrative constraints that game designers have chosen to place on themselves.

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