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The thing is the question is a simple 1 v 5 choice, the man's weight is completely immaterial to the question at hand and stating a weight is simply an obvious attempt to insult the overweight by7 implying that it makes them less of a human. To illustrate my point, You asked what is in essence "Would you kill 1 person to save five?" then adding "The one is fat by the way.", it is completely unnecessary to mention it unless to make the one less valuable, which in a 1 v 5 debate is frankly bullshit. Were the question a Fat v Not fat question I wouldn't be bringing this up, but the way the hypothetical is phrased you may as well be saying "but the one is fat so you don't need to feel guilty!". If you merely copied this verbatim from another source then I apologize for my vitriol, but if you composed this yourself then I feel I must say on behalf of the overweight and philosophers everywhere, Kindly get stuffed. | |
I think it's worth keeping in mind that it's still a Disney game; something meant to be enjoyable for tiny babies too. On the other hand, since that should've been apparent from the beginning, Warren Spector shouldn't have talked it up quite in the way he did, or at least chosen his words a bit better. A lot of RPGs have a choice here or there where what is 'good' and what is 'evil' is immediately apparent, but they are few and far between. Mass Effect of course eschews that and clearly labels every choice lest someone get confused. It's not a very good system really. It makes future interactions dependent on previous interactions in a nonsensical way. Also, the idea of the Renegade path is often that "sometimes sacrifices has to be made for the greater good". But that's not how it works out most of the time. Instead of the renegade succeeding where the paragon would have failed by making sacrifices the paragon succeeds without having to make any. Or perhaps more accurately, by playing the renegade you are actively planning on sacrificing things/people for no gain. | |
Why does the end comment usually make some statement about my weight? I've been losing weight, and mean comments negate any confidence that I may have gained between now and 22 pounds ago. | |
A) Fat myself B) Example was paraphrased from a book I read a fair while ago, and it was a fat-man in that example so I used it here. C) Oh get over it, if I had used "drug addict" or "terrorist" as an example would you have cared? | |
Would you rescue one baby or five old people? That makes me think of a moral choice in inFAMOUS... one of my favorit moral choices evur acctualy. | |
Interesting article. I'll probably never play "Epic Mickey" on account of I don't own a console, but it's an interesting point of untapped potential in a game. Makes me think of Fallout 3, where you have three choices: neutral (do an equal number of dastardly and divine deeds), evil (routinely slaughter and/or enslave defenceless innocents), or good (save baskets of kittens from fiery apocalypse). It's a points-based system, which means that you can quite easily blow up an entire town, but you only lose five hundred "points" by doing it, which is easily balanced by doing a few other quest-related good deeds. Nobody seems to remember your good / bad deeds once you're bad / good respectively (although if you blow up Megaton, you do get attacked by refugees afterwards occasionally). And of course, there's Bioshock's classic "murder little girls / save little girls" system, which I thought would've worked much better if you could choose one option at the start, and then just keep doing it until the point about two-thirds through where you meet Tenenbaum, at which point you're given the option to change your mind. Four endings: one for starts evil, stays evil; one for starts evil but redeems; one for starts good but becomes corrupted; and one for starts good stays incorruptible. | |
Coke is indeed better than Pepsi. Hope games will evolve when it comes to integrating moral choice. | |
I'm not kidding in the slightest when I say I wish I could spend christmas like Yahtzee. The awkward family reunions are really the words part of christmas. | |
One of the best moral choices I've come across in a game that actually affected gameplay afterwards was in the original Deus Ex (ME2's choices may have an impact in the sequeal, but for now we don't know): | |
The solution: Developers should stop distinguishing "choices". Just give us choices, period. Don't highlight it red, don't give me "evil" points afterwards. Show me the consequences and results of my actions and let me live with it. | |
No, but people expected it from Warren Spector. That's why people were disappointed. At least that's why I was. | |
Oh you and your silly fizzy drinks. It's not so hard to go natural, or for lack of any - cold water. Cold water when thirsty = best drink out there. | |
I disagree, the game falters on that point because it makes the decisions economical. If you want to be the paragon of all humanity all you have to do is buy basically every property in sight. Thus allowing you to make the costly "good" choices without having to worry about the treasury because you can constantly refill it with your ever-growing personal account. | |
A) Likewise, join the club we have... well we had cookies. B) Fair enough though my pint still stands C.1) I'd rather not get over it and neither should you, I see far too much casual fat bashing in my day to day life (even on this very forum) and the fact that people see it as somehow okay pisses me right off, it's this casual attitude that led to my several year long reclusion, not to mention my deep depression and severe anger issues that continue to this day. I apologize for the rant, as you can imagine this is a sore spot for me. C.2)(The drug addict or terrorist bit) Yes actually, partly because I have a cousin that was a drug addict and it took an OD and hospital visit to get him to stop, partly because I hate the way Americans use the word "Terrorist" as though it wins them any argument by default, but mostly because my point would still be valid. | |
To drop or not drop the nuke? That's the question. | |
The comment about the man's weight was only meant to be said for the final choice, as his weight was supposed to be enough to halt the train. As utterly un-realistic as this is, there really isn't any other way a single person could be sacrificed to stop a moving train. Hope this helps explain. | |
It does a bit but wouldn't it make more sense for the one man to be rigged with explosives by whoever set up this bizarre morality play? And before you say "but that would kill the passengers!" at no point were passengers (or even a driver) mentioned, for this bizarre test someone would have had to set this up in advance, otherwise what's stopping the driver from putting on the brakes? In the infinitely unlikely situation this happened during the train's normal running schedule I'd let the five die, no sense in making all those people late! :P | |
drop it | |
We were doing better in the 1980s with text adventure games. So no, its not above modern technology. That's oversimplifying to a great deal, but so very few game developoers these days care to develop a compelling story element to their game at all, even a linear on. And why should they, when flashy tripe with the depth of a spoon makes millions of dollars? As much as people bereave Bioware's usually pretty eh stories, they're making a hell of a lot more effort than the average game. The real problem here is that making a good story is HARD. Good graphics? There's tons of free engines that give shiny glitz these days. Good models and such? Okay that's a little harder but its not terribly hard to hire a good modeller. But story? It takes a great deal of creativity to break the mold with storytelling these days, and it can very easily break a game for people if the story becomes contrived, hard to follow, or they have difficulty to it. The real difficulty is keeping it accessible and fresh while at the same time entertaining. Moral choice systems complicate that all the more. It's not something that is easily done, and many companies get cold feet about staking their profits on it. But let me reiterate: with the technology and RAD style programming languages we have these days - technology is not our limitation. | |
The best morality system I've encountered was that of Infamous, primarily because it didn't infringe on the player's sense of morality; it was based on Cole's. I know, this is retreading on old ground ("It's like caring for a brick because his brick children don't call"), but forget, for an instant--a difficult instant I will grant you--that Cole was meant to be a projection of the player and cast him as an individual. It works pretty well! Cole is nothing, he is insignificant in societal status, he's like Oliver Twist, and then he gets electro-powers (Oliver Twist skating on power lines is a great idea, get to it Sucker Punch). The good-evil aspect is nothing but what society perceives Cole to be, which is a fascist or a saint. It is really well done because he's Cole, he's not you; that's why karma in Fallout 3 was lacking, due to it inherently telling what the player what his/her moral alignment was. Cole's position is clear-cut; do you want to lash out primordially against your societal oppressors, or do you want all the attention and fame from your fellow peers like some kind of tool? It's a wonderful exploration into the human psyche during the attaination of power (quite like Macbeth, actually, as he frets over the consequences of becoming the King of Scotland) if you read too hard into it. | |
I LOVED the Samesh Bhatia choice from ME1, especially since you could get Renegade or Paragon points for either resolution (get the body back or leave it with the military.) | |
Wow. You made an account to ninja me. Impressive. Welcome to the Escapist, by the way. Fallout 3 morality by and large suffers from pet the puppy/eat the puppy extremes, but this one case made me walk away from the computer and think for a good long while. I still can't say which option was "good." I ended up taking the kid just because it meant I got to kill a bunch of slavers with a baby in my inventory like Chow Yun-Fat.
The train is made of Explodium? | |
It's a shame Yahtzee couldn't see some of the New Vegas moral choices. You literally had to do nearly everything to have a lasting effect on a faction-granted- you were shoved more in the direction of NCR but it offered some good choices. Hopefully the system will get better and more meaningful as games evolve as a medium. | |
It curious to think how much better moral choices could be using the mechanics already in place. I've always wanted to make a war game and at one point have this moral clash: Here's the problem: | |
while I do think the moral choices in Me 2 are excellent the only thing I have a problem with is that it clearly shows which are "renegade" and "paragon" choices which takes some of the thourght out of it since the game punishes you for not ridgidly sticking to one side of the karma systm (but other than thet great game) | |
yes, coke is better than pepsi hmmm that one small mission in ME2...stop one of two missiles. stop one and it kills colonists, stop the other and it saves a valuable Alliance spaceport. honestly? all the people I saved in ME1 really just appear here and there to say thanks and maybe give a little exp/other rewards in ME2. maybe saving the spaceport, and it'll benefit me more if I work more with the Alliance than Cerberus in ME3... well okay personally I went with saving civilians (no paragon/renegade points either way) cuz I just wanted to stick one at the Alliance at that point in the game. ha! | |
mhmm pretty much that for me (and probably Yahtzee maybe) it was the thought that Disney would actually do something epic and drastic in the way they portrayed and messed up their perfect little world for great effect in the game...but as ZP pointed out: compromise :/ guess two early concept arts and a brief description really don't paint the picture | |
I don't expect the moral choice system to be explored successfully by the media in general. "Moral Choice" has become short hand for "a way to coax replay out by making them play twice for both endings." Mass Effect does it better, but not particularly good, and there's been little in the two games that actually makes long term choices something that stick with you. Not that it stopped me from enjoying it, but the industry has hardly made much of a compelling case for morality in games. | |
I totally agree with you. I really hate when they use a moral choice point system, especially to level up. You'll be making choices purely for those points. | |
Having been spending a lot of time with Fallout & Fable of late, I find myself musing on the whole morality thing quite a bit. Fallout: New Vegas probably had the right idea by pretty much ditching the importance of morality in favor of factions. Obviously, the Caesar faction is the evil one, but your karmic alignment doesn't have much to do with anything else in the game. Fallout 3 tried to make it work, but apart from how Three Dog reacted to you and which companions you could travel with, it made no difference. As for Fables, the system is so thoroughly superficial that they could actually make it interesting if they embraced its superficiality. Instead of equating purity with beauty, I think they ought to expand the interests of potential mates. Employ something along the lines of The Seven Deadly Sins and have potential mates be more attracted to you based on your personal quirks. If you're a violent bastard, have some girls around who are into that. If you like drinking in the pub, then the bar flies should be into you. No matter what type of character you are, there should be people who are totally into that... and for god's sake, do something that prevents the prostitutes from nagging me for marriage proposals. It's totally ridiculous when I'm collecting half a dozen hookers for an orgy and having the lot of them talking marriage. You should be able to pick up someone in a bar for random sex and have them trying to sneak out the next morning. | |
I agree with this. I just finished another runthrough of Mass Effect 2, and every time I made a choice I felt like I had to make the Paragon choice, because the game rewards you for sticking to one path, and there's no reason to waver from it. Granted, I actually agree with the Paragon choice much of the time from a real-life moral standpoint (not in every situation, but in many). However, I do feel that if the game completely did away with the +X Paragade boxes and the meters showing morality, and completely eliminated any bonuses or perks for choosing a moral side (Charm/Intimidate), the actual moral choice aspect of the game would be greatly improved. For one, I wouldn't feel forced to pick any one side, and could thus feel free to choose based on what I feel I should do. For another, not telling you which choice is good or bad forces the player to consider the ramifications of his actions instead of being told his choices are good or bad. EDIT: I feel I should clarify. | |
Personally I think games with a morals system are great fun...as long as you see the results of your actions and decisions. *Looks at dragon age* I'm not terribly fond of the meter showing which side of the scale I'm leaning towards though. It is kind of cool but I don't need a meter to look over my shoulder telling me not to kill the nice farmer or everyone will hate me. I'm going to do what I want. Hence the choice system. Let me accept the consequences chose. | |
The Witcher had the best morality system I've come across in a game because the decisions you made were never directly connected to your quest but rather a means of deciding how future events would pan out. | |
More philosophical wish-wash. The only difference between contemplating all those moral dilemmas and crying into your cappuccino is that eventually you'll realize that crying into your cappuccino just isn't cutting it anymore so off you go, stumbling back to your old life or whats left of it anyway as to filling your head with everunanswered questions would be the equivalent of planning to travel around the world in 80 days and on the 1896th hour you'd still find yourself in bed with both your hands down your pants. | |
No, people are against pushing the fat man into the train because of the fact that the first question deals with choosing to have one man, who's already in danger's way, die for more people, whereas the second involves actively throwing somebody at the problem. I wouldn't do it with the second one simply for the sheer terror the man would feel as I force him onto the tracks. That's something I wouldn't be able to do. | |
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