Trabia Garden

Videogame morality is an odd thing. In Red Dead Redemption, you can shoot innocent passers-by whenever you feel like it and then cleanse your soul by protecting a ranch from criminals. By performing a minor good deed, you've paid for your murder and you're morally pure again. It's very strange.

It can sometimes be hard to shake off the 'good things undo bad things, right?' brand of videogame morality when you're playing games with actual moral consequences. In the first Bioshock game, you occasionally encounter children who have been genetically altered and brainwashed. You can either cure them of their brainwashing or harvest some sort of power-enhancing substance from them, killing the child in the process. When th_esaurus played, she sometimes rescued and sometimes harvested. She ended up getting the bad ending, which castigated her for her cruelty.

"I barely harvested any of them!" she exclaimed at the screen.

"It's not okay if you only kill some of the children," I said.

And yet I recognised where her reasoning came from; in many videogames, we're trained to think that we can deliberately do something bad and then avoid any consequences by doing something good, even if the bad thing is deeply, deeply awful.

I'm not saying that this is an impression we carry into real life; I'm fairly certain most people who play videogames can tell the difference between real-world morality and videogame morality. But it's a curious difference between real life and many videogames with morality systems. I suppose it's difficult to construct a system more complex than 'good things get you goodness points, bad things get you badness points and they cancel each other out'.

Undertale takes a really interesting approach to moral choice. Unlike Bioshock, where 'more power' is the temptation for immoral actions, Undertale tempts you with something much more valuable: more story, more game. But it deliberately makes the 'murder everything' route as unenjoyable to play as possible. You have to really make an effort to do awful things. You have to consciously want to go down the evil route. You have to be determined. The game judges you intensely for it, and that judgement feels earned; there was no reason you couldn't have done a nice playthrough instead.

I've been thinking about this because I've been playing Virtue's Last Reward. The point of the murder route in Undertale is that you don't have to do it. You can beat the game quite happily without killing a single enemy. Virtue's Last Reward is different; there are a lot of different routes, some of which you can access only by being a huge arsehole, and you have to go down most of them in order to beat the game. Do your actions have no weight because you're ultimately required to take them if you want to reach the ending?

There's another question in Virtue's Last Reward: do your actions have no weight because you can canonically jump to another timeline in which you weren't an arsehole? Or do they have an inescapable weight, because all timelines in the game are canonically real timelines that exist in some capacity? The moment you hit the 'betray' button, that's a thing that happened in some universe. But, in the end, it doesn't really feel like your decision, because the game acts as if that universe exists before you truly bring it into being. It punishes you based on your future actions, which it knows you'll take because the game will eventually corner you into making them.

Wow, Virtue's Last Reward is really difficult to explain.

In any case, if you're cruel in Undertale, it feels like your cruelty. You could have made friends, you could have helped people, and instead you made the conscious choice to kill everyone. The game judges you, and you know you deserve it. If you're cruel in Virtue's Last Reward, it's easy to mentally defend yourself. I betrayed an unconscious child in that game, because I reasoned that, hey, that might be the only way I could deactivate a bomb in another timeline and save everyone. The game judges you, and you go 'hey, you were the one who made me do this!'

This isn't a criticism of Virtue's Last Reward, which I'm enjoying! I like the way it examines the concept of different timelines branching out from different choices, and I'm looking forward to seeing what it's working towards. I suppose I just felt like rambling about videogames for hundreds of words, because I always feel like rambling about videogames for hundreds of words.

I've fallen back into my terrible addiction to watching What Would You Do? clips on YouTube, alas. For those unaware of it, What Would You Do? is an American hidden camera show in which actors play out scenarios (e.g. 'Some arsehole's hitting on a woman who clearly wants him to leave her alone! What would you do?') and see whether bystanders step in. It is utterly, shamelessly emotionally manipulative. I can't resist.

There's one particular actor called Jeremy who appears in many of these scenarios, almost exclusively as some sort of terrible scumbag (he's the unwelcome flirter in the clip I linked to above). Troublingly, I've started to find him very attractive. Why does this happen to me? I hope I'm never asked to describe my perfect man, because I think my answer might have to be 'deeply unpleasant and covered in blood'.

(Here's a fanfiction idea I'm ashamed to admit I've considered: Jeremy the actor is creepily seduced by 'Jeremy', the awful character he plays. The only reason I'm not writing this is because I haven't seen nearly enough of the actor out-of-character to be able to characterise him, which is probably just as well; I'm not sure that What Would You Do? fanfiction is really something the world needs.)


I've been thinking 'hmm, perhaps I've been posting too much about videogames lately'; if the alternative is talking about What Would You Do?, though, I suppose that might be for the best. Back to videogames!

I finished Lightning Returns a few days ago! Final verdict: there's not nearly enough of the original cast - the reason I love XIII so much is because of all the relationships between the characters, so it saddens me that we see so little of those relationships here - but you can make Lightning wear a mask of her own face and therefore this game is amazing.

I forgot to mention in my last entry, but Chocolina is the best character in Lightning Returns. When I first saw her, I exclaimed 'OH MY GOD, IT'S CHOCOLINA' aloud. My very favourite of all the silly things she says: 'Here's your reward. You know, for that "job". This conversation never happened, capisce? I'm just kidding! I don't ever want to forget any of our exciting conversations!'

Being a fan of the Troy Baker Forms an Intense Relationship with a Teenage Girl videogame genre, I thought I'd give BioShock Infinite a try next, despite having been spoiled for more or less everything. Unfortunately, I am not a fan of first-person camera angles. I've had to slow the camera movement down to a crawl to avoid motion sickness, and I don't ever want to touch a skyline again. I'm intrigued by the relationship between Booker and Elizabeth, though, so I'll probably persevere!