I felt I needed to pick up on a thread regarding video game morality and clarify some things from last week’s PopMatters column.
For some reason when I was expressing my love for the complexity in a moral choice in The Wolf Among Us against the normal bland good/evil dichotomy, it was confused for me saying that it was great that that one dichotomy was replace with a law/chaos dichotomy and that was somehow commendable. Especially when I said that this particular choice went against the grain of how we think of law vs. chaos style choices through its framing.
It wasn’t that the game was weighing a negative against and positive and then asking you how you would like to play your character this time around, but crafting a situation where the circumstances meant that it was two different types of positives held against one another. I jump through several other games as examples to try and explicate this point.
Also, I wanted to the picture below to be somewhere in the post, but during resizing to fit into the column the text within became unreadable. So here it is.
Go over to PopMatters and read my expansion on a point I didn’t think I needed to make so obvious in the first place.
I feel that in a few older games, such circumstances where handled surprisingly well, the underrated Deus Ex: Invisible War comes to mind, since being able to switch factions on the go, still surprises me to this day. Deus Ex: HR had great dialogue wheels, but it was a more linear game; except in combat, where you could go full stealth or full guns blazing.