Game Design, Gamer Culture, Politics, Virtual Worlds
Morality in Games, or The Unexamined Game is Not Worth Playing
Video games are growing up. Well, they’re trying to anyway. We used to be content with traipsing through the carefully groomed grounds of the Mushroom Kingdom, guiding pixelated sprites toward a jaggy princess. Maybe this blind escapism is enough: as Super Mario Galaxy showed, sometimes it’s fun to play with gravity and not have to worry about economic turmoil or national security concerns. Sometimes, though, we want games to be something more, to illuminate a previously unknown aspect of the human condition the way a great movie or book does. In the last few years, games like Fable and BioShock have featured morality as a core mechanic, while Grand Theft Auto has actively flouted it and many others have avoided the issue altogether. But the real question here is: can games be moral?
The original Fable, while an enjoyable experience, suffered heavily from over-hyping; in the years and months leading up to its release, Lionhead founder and game developer Peter Molyneux became somewhat infamous from promising incredibly grandiose things for Fable. When a lot of once-promised features didn’t make the final cut, gamers felt a bit gipped, and the Fable experience became somewhat tainted.
So, there’s a video game coming out that you really want to play. And you’re waiting for it. Patiently. Or as patiently as possible. And then you find out that the release date has been pushed back another quarter. It’s a painful feeling that hits you: agonizing, nauseating, and depressing. There is little else in this world that hurts gamers as badly as delayed release dates.
Lionhead Studios has announced that they will release the sequel to the legendary “choose your own destiny” game, Fable, for Xbox 360 in October of this year. The sequel, dubbed Fable 2, will introduce new and exciting changes such as new weapons and armor, as well as an epic storyline. However, do these changes mean that this game will be far better than the first, or will Fable 2 just be a recreation of the original Fable with shiny new equipment?
Take a poll: how many video game creators/developers can your friends and co-workers name? Not the companies, but the actual people behind the video games. I polled a few people, and between them, they could only come up with one creator: Peter Molyneux. For those of you that don’t know Molyneux, he’s one of the creators of Fable and a founder of Lionhead Studios. But beyond that, they couldn’t name a single one.