Open-Morality
I am really getting sick of open-morality games1.
These games have a problem. It's not that they lack a wide enough range of moral decisions: I really do believe that my Fallout 3 character is a shining beacon of humanity's hope in the wretched landscape of the USA's post-apocalyptic capitol. And I realize that he could just as well have been an absolute bastard, even offending the sensibilities of the other horrible people in that world. So, okay: let's say that the game industry has figured out how to give the player some choice in how their character develops. The problem is that they haven't figured out how to construct an engaging story from those decisions. Not once have I felt any twitch of meaningful emotion or insight while playing any open-world game that focuses on allowing the player to make wide-ranging moral decisions. Okay, so most games don't give me any such reactions, but I think open-morality games actually destroy tiny bits of my brain that are responsible for emotion and insight. Maybe I'm being too harsh.
I want to talk about Fable 2 today. I picked up Fable 2 a couple of weeks ago, honestly expecting to not like it very much. I'd played through most of the first Fable game, and found its story pathetic but its gameplay fairly entertaining. After playing it, I ranted to my friends that the morality of the world was shallow: The leader of the Hero's Guild, after turning me from a village boy into a full-fledged adventurer, gave a speech indicating that whether I would be good or evil was entirely my own decision. In this world, I could create suffering or ease it. Sure, that's true, it is my decision, but you know, I would expect some encouragement in the good direction at this point (later plot events notwithstanding). When major characters don't even care whether you're good or evil, it sure does lessen the importance of that decision. So, morality in Fable is just another part of the toy.
Other than that, I thought the game was somewhat fun.
I've also been antagonistic to Peter Molyneux. He has some strong opinions about how stories in games should work, and after having played Fable and seeing how weak of a story it had, I basically condemned him as an unfortunately popular eccentric.
I've changed my mind. Fable 2 is good. I like Fable 2 a lot. And maybe I don't think Peter Molyneux is quite as crazy as I did.
Don't get me wrong: I still think open-morality is a dead-end road for narrative in games. Frankly, I think that people like Mr. Elrod who are apparently deeply emotionally affected by this game need to read some books and get a more robust personal philosophy. If a player can construct a unique, unauthored narrative out of the simple mechanics and quests of this or other open-world games, then he could probably do the same with a string tied to a stick. We all have our weaknesses, Mr. Elrod. I watch sappy anime. But I don't imbue it with an imaginary quality of depth, even if it sometimes makes me cry.
So why do I like Fable 2? Let me explain. It's incomplete to call Fable 2 an open-morality game. In addition to being an open-morality game, it is a parody of open morality.
I realized this as I was having my character join the Temple of Shadows -- the evil brotherhood of monks who receive benefits from an unnamed evil force by sacrificing innocent villagers. I should have realized it earlier (arguably even back when I played the first Fable game). But this is what made it clear to me that this game was parodying moral decisions. You see, the Dark Monk (or whatever he is) who decides whether you can join the Temple of Shadows gives you a simple task: eat five baby chicks. Including the feathers, bones, and beaks. While they're alive. He mentions that back in his day, they only had to kick a blind beggar's walking stick out from under him, but nowadays they've got more strict entry requirements. As you eat the chicks, one by one, he makes comments indicating his disgust at your actions, at one point crying "You really have no scruples, do you!?"
This scene had me cracking up. It was well-written black humor2, and the subject matter was so over the top that I could have no serious emotional reaction (other than amusement) to my character taking the "evil path" by joining this temple.
Another example of this kind of thing is the Assassin's Guild. The guild will offer you jobs for killing particular (seemingly random) NPCs somewhere in the world. Each contract has the reason for the hit: reasons like the character having bad breath, or the guild needing to maintain its monthly quota.
This is not a dramatic player-generated narrative, people.
And I like Fable 2 more than Oblivion. Sure, when I took that first step out of the dungeon at the beginning of Oblivion I was excited to see the wide-open world awaiting my exploration. But when I actually found things in that big open world, the badly written and unengaging stories really detracted from the experience. I still go back to the game from time to time and enjoy a bit of a romp around the world, but who was really that excited about completing the main story? And what alternatives do we have? Farmer Brown wants you to go into a cave and kill a giant crab. Epic. Fable 2 has its moments of badly written story, but they make up a way smaller portion of the game. That is, less than all of it. Fable 2 has good comedy surrounding a bad story. Oblivion just has the bad story.
I still think Peter Molyneux is probably a bit crazy, but I can respect what he's done a lot more now. I think I conflated his seriousness about story with seriousness of story. It turns out, he is just deadly bloody serious about comedy3.
Footnotes:
1: I would say 'to coin a phrase' here, but I can't be bothered to google it up to make sure nobody else has said it yet. Anyway, it's clear that we're going to need more words than just "open-world" to explain the things happening in game development these days. Open-geography, open-morality, open-plot: these are all fairly different, and there are games to which these terms apply independently. Exercise for the reader: categorize Far Cry 2, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto, Deus Ex, and any Final Fantasy game.
2: Mr. Gijsbers, I understand that interactive dark comedy is difficult for you, and so I recommend you do not play Fable 2 to avoid wildly misinterpreting it.
3: Actually, I don't want to pretend like I'm getting at the True Intended Meaning behind this game. Mr. Molyneux might actually think that his game is a touching piece dealing head-on with hard moral problems, but if he did, he has failed. Oh, look! A stick and string!
16 comments:
I think it would be very, very hard to construct a video game with dramatically interesting morality.
A Macbeth-style, "I'm going to do something now that I know to be evil" only works dramatically because Macbeth has a conscience (something gamers lack.)
You'll never get a moral beacon like Daniel or Mordecai, because there's nothing to be afraid of. The gamer always wins.
"Hamlet: The Video Game" would be wonderfully short. His dad would visit him as a ghost, he'd swear to kill his uncle, then he'd kill his uncle.
At the end of the day, the things you are making moral-seeming decisions don't have any real attachment to your self, which makes all of the decisions aesthetic ones.
My hunch is that morality in games is best left as a flavoring, and that plot should be handled separately.
Indeed it could have been much more exciting to be bad if major characters and indeed the narration, urged you to never do evil and yet you could.
The dark side wouldn't really be requiring you to eat chicks, instead they'll simply suggest unethical, yet effective methods to accomplish objectives.
Its a shame really.
Have you tried last "Bards Tale"? Very good parody. Best laugh ever.
Would I compare Fable 2 favorably to the darkly comic books I've read that deal with morality? Would I hold it on par with Nabokov's Pale Fire, Peter Carey's Illywhacker, or Margaret Atwood's Robber Bride? Absolutely not.
But I would hold it up to many of the cinematic dark comedies I've enjoyed and I think it holds up pretty well. In particular, because the the design aesthetic of the gameplay, audio, and animation, lends itself so well to allowing the player to explore their own fabula throughout the gameplay process.
You, for example, brought along a healthy skepticism about Molyneux to the game and it still managed to charm you and win you over. I, on the other hand, have made no secret about my "Molyneux tendon" and allowed myself to approach the game as emotionally open as possible.
And please, no need to be so formal. Call me Corvus.
Thanks for commenting, Corvus.
I realize that I wanted to write more in this post, particularly about the expression system, since it parodies the social interaction that is so much more tedious in other RPGs (hooray! no more lawnmowing through conversation menus!).
Anyway, to respond to your comment:
I disagree. (I guess you saw that one coming)
(Is "fabula" an English word? The only definition I can find of it seems to disagree with your usage:
"a term used by russian formalist school of literary theory and some later film theorists to mean the chronological reconstruction of all the events of a nonchronological plot.")
Anyway, I assume it means something like "fantasy". Again, I'll refer to my "stick and string" argument: is Fable 2 really that much better than a stick and a string (or, say, a set of dolls) at allowing the player to act out *interesting* player-generated narrative? The toolkit that we have available: expressions, clothing, combat, and familial relationship. Okay, so that's undeniably more complex than a set of dolls (barring the use of imagination), but what is it about these things that makes them intrinsically more suitable for fantasy-making? Each system follows a fairly simple set of rules which any player can figure out with a bit of fiddling. These systems are simple toys, not deeply-implemented abstract interactions. It took me much longer to figure out the way that Galatea works than to figure out that farting makes some people like me and others hate me. I thought Galatea was much more interesting.
And the game acknowledges this and encourages the player to treat them as toys: you can just go up to a random person and hit the "y" button and see everything there is to know about that person: three different axes of relationship and some flags. NPCs in this game are dolls with animations and audio clips.
I have to agree that Fable 2 definitely holds up against some cinema as far as pure entertainment value goes, but so does the original _Doom_. I don't think Fable 2 comes anywhere close to competing with cinema inasmuch as a story or even execution of comedy is concerned (though there are some, more linear, video games that I would say *do* compete on those aspects). And hey, it's hard for a video game, I admit. Movies have control of pacing and timing that videogames simply cannot provide (Though Fable 2 has the same timing problems in dialog that have plagued voice-acted video games, especially RPGs, for years. Stop putting five-second delays between lines, developers! What is wrong with you!)
I do think that all these tools can be *fun*. But it's essentially the same kind of fun that MMRPG players have when they kill fifty wolves to watch their XP meter go up. When you first enter the MMRPG world as a new player, it really is exciting and novel. But after a while, you realize how monotonous it is.
@jml
I would just put one qualifier into your first sentence: it's hard to construct a video game that has dramatically interesting moral decisions that are made by the player. I think it's possible in a video game, just as it is in a book, to play out an interesting morality story. The way that you do this is by taking away some of the player's agency.
You've got the right fabula, but you're missing a lot of the exploration of the concept done by Eco in Role of the Reader. And by me in my theoretical approach to discussing video games as narrative.
Fabula is the mental process the audience goes through when participating with a narrative. They construct a reality that supports the narrative, adding details and making suppositions, changing it with each new piece of information revealed. My contention is that we all bring so much of our own personal bagged to the narrative that any two given fabulas (experience of the narrative) are wildly divergent.
Anyway, I don't disagree with much of what you're saying about Fable 2's mechanics, I'm just saying that it's possible to get much more meaning out of it than you did. That doesn't mean you played it "wrong" anymore than it means I played it "right."
I'm also encouraged to see a developer utilize game mechanics so clearly to try and inspire emotional involvement. Particularly in a way that allows for quite a bit of emotional agency (for lack of a better term) in the audience.
We're in the infancy of this sort of approach to storytelling and I'm encouraged to see AAA titles moving the evolution forward.
@radix
Fair call.
I think Fable 2 is best compared to a British pantomime, with bad guys who aren't so much evil as moustache-twirlingly dastardly, big names popping in for cameos (hello Stephen Fry, Julia Sawalha and Ron Glass), fart jokes and regular winks to the audience.
By far the most successful part of the game was the dog. Molyneux said during development that the aim of the dog was to give you a companion who you grow attached to and never, ever, pisses you off. I chose "the needs of the many" at the end of the game, and wandering around post-finale without my dog is a strangely lonely experience.
@Bice
I totally flipped it when Garth said his first line. When I saw him in the prison my thoughts were: "Shepherd Book is in this game!?" From a distance, Garth even looks a bit like Ron Glass.
The dog is quite cool. He's probably the best-animated character in the game -- or maybe I just say that because he's a lot more cute than a human when he's cowering in fear. But it did remind me of my own dear old dog from my childhood, bounding happily -- let me wipe this tear from my eye -- what's this? Am I generating a narrative? Drat! I have been defeated!
I chose Family the first time. My second character is definitely going to choose something else, and I'm not looking forward to losing him.
Oh yeah, Bice, I came across your glowing dismembered head in my game the other day. !?
I always tell my students that they have to do more, not less, of what is difficult for them; so I have a hard time understanding your advice to me. For which I nevertheless want to thank you, of course.
@Victor Gijsbers
Only a friendly jab. I would in fact like to see a blog post from you about Fable 2, if you end up playing it.
I enjoyed Fable, and might play Fable 2 is it ever comes out for the PC. (It is X-Box only for now, isn't it?)
(I did play Portal again, by the way; and although you people did convince me that it is probably meant to be funny, I am far from convinced that it actually is funny. There are three basic jokes, which are told over and over again; and there is none of the attention to detail that makes movies like Dr Strangelove and Rocky Horror succeed brilliantly. But perhaps this is not a fruitful topic for discussion.)
Open morality done right in a game? EVE-Online.
You tell funny jokes, Anonymous.
The Witcher is one of VERY few diverging story games (with morals playing a really important role) that is actually done right. I found the game incredibly engaging, and the character - as well as the mess I created - really felt like my own. And just to finish that plug: If you haven't played that game, play it. The first 40 minutes of gameplay are kind of poorly thought out (very linear), but just remember how awesome the intro cinematic was and stick with it. Everything to follow is outstanding
I think one of the keys with The Witcher is that they don't blatantly say "this is good" and "that is bad." The way some games do that, often going so far as having a bar to describe your overall morality, is equivalent to scoring in interactive fiction. Fable, if I recall correctly, even told you ahead of time whether you were about to be good or bar even if there was no foreseeing the matter. Not sure if Fable 2 does, as I haven't played it.
That kills the mood and turns the morality issue into yet another numbers and charts game. There isn't personality in the issue; you actively choose whether to be good or bad based on what will win The Game. When this is done right, the player chooses what to do based on how he feels, as an extension of his character in the game.
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