David Gaider, Lead Writer of Bioware's upcoming Dragon Age, is applying his theories to his game. "What most players seem to demand is not just to be evil but to be intelligent evil ... which is the sort of thing that requires long-term plans rather than short-term actions, which is very hard to telegraph to the player without using outright exposition." That's a very hard thing to design without the entire game being about playing an evil character.
The traditional result is the designated evil option ends up being petty or mean instead of dastardly. Occasionally, however, players are given a chance to truly embrace their darker selves. One oft-cited example in Knights of the Old Republic involves two of your companions who are introduced as dear friends, Mission and Zaalbar. At one point, because Zaalbar owes the main character a Wookie life-debt, you can manipulate him into murdering his friend, the adolescent Mission. The motivation to harm a character because the player dislikes her is an enormously evil deed. But the Mission-Zaalbar story is an exception that proves the rule: It's hard to let players be evil without substantially altering the plot.
In multiplayer games, however, the capacity for true evil is endless. The supposed victim of game violence in multiplayer games isn't just a binary construct, it's controlled by another human. One player's actions can very directly affect another person. Competitive games like FPSes or even organized PVP in MMOGs doesn't enter into our estimations of evil, because participation in these games implies a social contract. Red agrees to shoot Blue, and vice versa.
But killing weaker players in MMOGs, commonly called ganking or griefing, is real evil exacted on other humans. Here, the part of the evil definition where one "deliberately deprives innocent people of their humanity" comes into play. The act of killing a low-level avatar offers no reward in most games. The only motivation for griefing is to deprive the other player of his freedom.
Even though there are similarities between social psychology experiments like those designed by Milgram and Zimbardo and modern videogames, the two were made for very different purposes. The experiments were created in controlled environments to test specific ideas. Games are a form of entertainment, albeit a complex and interactive one. But the concept that the way people play videogames is a measure of their character is a very compelling one.
It's interesting to examine our relationship with good and evil in the context of a videogame. Would I demand extra payment for rescuing a lost boy? Would I kill a prostitute to get back the money I just paid her? Would I turn to the Dark side if I could? These are questions I can't answer in the real world, and games that enable such reflection should be lauded instead of vilified.
Am I evil? I don't know, but the fact I can get closer to the answer in a world with a reset button is anything but.
Greg Tito is a playwright and standup comic residing in Brooklyn, NY. He is currently splitting time between World of Warcraft, a new D&D 3rd edition campaign and finishing one of his many uncompleted writing projects. He also blogs semi-regularly at http://onlyzuul.blogspot.com/.
