![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
Morality. Immorality. I hate to have other people's morality forced on me, I hate to suffer other people's immorality, but, boy, it is fun to play with my own head!
The best place to do it safely, of course, is computer games.
I love consequences in my gaming, and like that they not always be made obvious at the outset.
Killing a bandit and finding a baby's bottle on her body. Did the bandit kill the baby and take the bottle? Or did you just kill a mother? This is a subtle consequence. I like subtlety.
You failed to warn the school that the nuke was coming. Later you see a burned out schoolbus - just a part of the scenery, you might think, unless you have played through it before, and did warn the school: in which case, you will remember that there was no school bus. Consequences don't have to be obvious or have effect on gameplay.
Symbiotic relationships are always good: if you cut off the "evil" bit you harm the "good". In the Eragon book and movie, killing an evil dragonrider killed its dragon too. No idea if that was carried on to a moral dilemma in the game, though. Another good example: Jeckyll and Hyde.
Then there's the conflicting interests one. Someone has a wasting illness. They want to die. Someone else cares extremely deeply about them, and is desperately working on a cure, with a very low chance of success, but at least it's a chance. Do you let the person die?
One of the conflicting interests can be you: you and someone who can't swim are on a boat. Boat sinks. You can't carry both your pack of equipment, and the non-swimmer to shore.
Who's more important? Do you betray one friend or a thousand strangers?
Do the ends justify the means? Do you torture people for information, or do without?
Do the ends justify the risks? Do you allow a faction to remain neutral, or assassinate their leader so that the second in command, who is more amenable, will ally the faction with your cause? Is it worth the risk of getting found out, and having the faction go over to the enemy?
I was just following orders! You are told "take Snow White into the woods and kill her." Do you kill her? Refuse? Let her go but lie about it? Flee with her? You are told "torture this man" - do you? (in real life experiments, people would obey the authority figure) Your colleague, told to help you, objects strongly and refuses to take part - do you side with him, or your employer? (in the tests where the subject sees a peer standing up for what's "right", people are able to break from the "obey authority" mindset far easier).
Who do you save? A town with a population of M has a well infected with a fatal disease. You have N doses of a cure. N<<M. Who do you allow to die? If you see and speak with them as their health fails and they die, how will you feel? Will you give up your own dose, and hope that your high health and stack of stimpaks will see you through? Will you give all your stimpaks the dying, even if it will only stretch out their time a little? Will those you give the dose to give their dose to others? If you give it to them in a way that they cannot, will they hate you? Either way, will the survivors feel deep guilt in themselves that they survived?
Who do you spare? Someone with an infectious disease is trying to break out from enforced quarantine for emotional reasons: to be with her dying daughter perhaps. How far are you willing to go to prevent her getting out of quarantine? She might not even be infected!
Bandits, to me, should be a moral dilemma. They are not simple, evil killable mobs. They are people driven to rob from others. Not "attack and fight to the death" - that's just retarded. Why are they so desperate? What are they trying to preserve? If they take the time to explain their situation, would the player help instead of fighting?
Moral conflicts don't need to be purely inside you. You can morally conflict with other people. The paladin in the awesome Goblins comic is a good example: he is sworn to obliterate all goblins, and sees them as irredeemably evil. If he met any goblins from Underworld2, he'd massacre them down to the last baby. But, he's acting out of a strong moral code, to protect what he believes in. Is he evil? Should you fight him?
The Ultima character generation moral dilemmas are interesting. Stuff like:
"You and your friend battle a dragon. He thinks he slew the beast, but you know that you are the one who struck the telling blow. Do you Honestly correct him when he claims the glory for himself? Or Humbly allow him to take credit?"
Its very important, when considering consequences, to remember that the player can lie too! If I say "sure, I'll go kill Bob" I mean "I want the character I have spoken to, to think that I intend to kill Bob", not "when I meet Bob, and talk to him, automatically launch me into a fight to the death with him".
It is also very important to remember that if you make the player take an either-or choice, then even if you have done everything in your power to ensure they don't find a way to make them choose "both!"... you have to be very aware that they might just do so, and you need to code that in as a possible result anyway. "You found enough vaccine for the whole village? That's incredible, I didn't think there was that much in the whole of the wasteland! What did you do, find a cloning bug? ZOMG HAX!"
In one game where you had to choose to put your wife or child into an escape pod, you could pick up the child, and by walking into her, push the wife into the pod while holding the child. The cutscene would start... and she'd be magically outside the pod! Really poor on the part of the game designers.
And also important to ensure that you can't undo what you did: In Larian's "Divine Divinity", I am told, "there was a quest to cure 3 poisoned people in a quarantined area, with only 2 cure potions. This was designed to force you to choose who lived and who would die (though left alone they never actually got sick enough to die). Before a couple cheats were found that could duplicate a cure potion, a German player found that you could either pickpocket a potion back to re-use, or kill a cured person to get them to drop the potion (there was no reputation drop for this, unlike using a direct attack against most friendly NPCs). Whatever method was used, all three quests could be completed, and they would all stay healthy (though the main gate to the quarantine area would remain sealed)". - Coded properly, the potion would either have been drunk and destroyed when used, or would have detected being removed from the inventory, and have him whine about having lost it.
What I’d really, really, dearly love in RPGs is the ability to talk with the people you’re fighting.
So you have the choice not just to kill or run away, but to:
taunt
Successful taunts cause target to enter berserk mode. We already have berserk in Oblivion, taunts in every single FPS since Doom, though admittedly only Duke3D ever did them well tongue.gif
stop fighting and talk out your differences,
Oblivion did this with the "Yield" command, but unfortunately made it related to the opponent's disposition to you, so regardless of your speech skill, you could never successfully yield to someone who had attacked you first, since they "hated" you enough to attack you.
offer them gold if they stop attacking
Not done anywhere yet, but in an engine that has yield and trading, should not be too great a leap.
And not just have you try to start or end the combat: have NPCs:
taunt you
Aka have NPCs cast "berserk" on you, with your speech ability governing your saving throw.
beg for their lives when beaten near death
OK, it's not been done, but how hard is it?
Code:
when npc starts combat
if (NPC's strength) < (0.1 * PC's apparent ferocity)
then
if (npc can flee)
flee
else if (npc can surrender)
surrender
else
fight
when npc takes damage
if NPC is in combat, AND is marked as surrender-capable, AND (HP < 5% OR AMMO == 0)
if (npc can flee)
flee
else if (npc can surrender)
surrender
else
fight
(I say "apparent ferocity" as I feel this should be a combination of things like reputation current health, arms and armour, whether his weapon is holstered, whether he's just defeated anyone nearby in a fight, XP level, charisma, and so on. Comparing the NPC against how strong he thinks the PC is, would be a bit harder to code but more realistic, I feel, than to compare the NPC's real strength against the PC's real strength. It would mean that a wussy or pacifist PC could "fake out" strong characters by just looking buff.
You could get prettymuch infinitely complex, like with anything in a RPG. You could take into account daft stuff like whether the PC's outfit was made of matching pieces, and whether the NPC thought people in uniform were scary, or wusses... but beyond a certain point, the player stops being able to second-guess the results completely accurately, and at that point it becomes "realistic": no point getting any more complex than that. So, a simple "reputation + random roll" might even suffice for most purposes.
Basic flee/surrender/fight decision making, ending combat before death, is not beyond today's technology, would not take ten years to develop, but nobody, so far as I know, has ever done it in any game.
If the NPC is at 3 hp and he's out of ammo he will toss aside his gun and beg for his life damnitt! And if I choose to spare him and let him go, I have to run the risk of him attacking me again when he's healed up and rearmed. And if I choose not to spare him, and people see me killing an unarmed cripple begging for his life, then that could be a problem for me too!
Combine it with what we already know is in engines such as Oblivion: NPCs can pick up stuff when you are in the area. So you spare them, or they flee; they move to the weapon cabinet, grab a healthpack and weapon, and attack again!
If you also make bad guys heal and rearm over time if you leave the area, that would obviously improve realism too.
Have beating someone unconscious with your fists mean something, too: that you have beaten them, disarmed them, but spared their lives and they and people nearby know it: some might consider you hardass but merciful, others might consider you weak for your morality. OK, this hasn't been done yet, but shouldn't take ten years. Past combat affects the opponent's disposition towards you.
This depends on the NPC, and whether you or they fled/surrendered/fell unconscious, and on who started the fight: if they attacked you and you still spared them, that's a possible plus. If you attacked them and they fled, or were beaten unconscious, probably not so much of a plus!
Having people nearby affected could be harder. However, the Oblivion engine has murder detection within a certain range, the Ultima engines have theft detection - can't an engine have "sparing" detection, too?
Stuff like that’d make the decision to kill in combat so much more immersive & meaningful. I am hoping that Oblivion’s yield was just the first step on this road, and I applauded it - but I really hope that it’s taken further in future.
I am so sick, so terribly, terribly sick of fights being to the death, and death being nothing but a source of XP. Nobody in real life has a bar fight to the death, not unless stuff goes really wrong.
NPCs shouldn’t willingly attack someone who can clearly wipe the floor with them, unless they're defending something more important to them than their own life.
Combat should have further repercussions. What if a woman bandit out by a deserted shack demands your food so you kill her, but then you go inside the shack and see a baby in a crib. You killed its mother, and if you leave it there, it will die slowly of thirst/starvation. What do you do? This one doesn't even take any PROGRAMMING! In the construction kit, place female bandit, place baby, bingo, moral dilemma in a can!
You could, with simple scripted rules, add more depth. Take the rule "all children without parents turn feral within one week, have disposition to player reduced, blah blah." So, you kill a guard, then later find his children, gone feral with nobody to look after them. What do you do?
You have the rules: "guard feeds and tortures prisoner daily on schedule. Guard kills prisoner when a set plot trigger happens. Prisoner starves without food for more than two days." So, you spare a guard's life and later see him torturing and killing a prisoner. Or you kill him and find the prisoner. Or never find the prisoner until it's died of thirst anyway... suddenly, your guard-killing has consequences.
If you kill or spare someone, you will affect that person's dependants, lovers, employers, friends, enemies, victims and others.
OK, now this, building a web of relationships between people, is more complex. But... not THAT complex.
Permit NPCs be members of any number of factions (already in most engines).
Extend that by allowing them to have relationships not just with factions, but with characters too.
Give each relation a value from -100 (utter enemy, would love you for killing him) to +100 (close family member, would never forgive you).
If you are seen to have killed a person (using existing theft/murder-detection system), check that person's relationship network, and affect each person [edit: or faction] in the network by that amount.
If the death was a murder, double the amount.
If you want to get really fancy, as well as the relation value, give each character "onOwnDeath" and "onContactdDeath" script hooks so that you can change conversation options and whatnot, as well as just their dispositions. This allows us to modify the above-described hardcoded "all children without parents turn feral within one week" to "dependents who's guardians are dead". No need to restrict to children, can include pets, slaves, etc, who become freed by their master's death, who's disposition to the player may go up, etc.
None of that is rocket science. None is beyond what is plausible. None is 10 years' work. Most of it is maybe 10 days', plus time for voice acting the surrender dialogues. But this, giving meaning to death, is the stuff that separates RPG from FPS.
Now, we have killing optional for PCs... shouldn't NPCs have the same privilege to decide not to kill?
As I understand it, radiant AI had to be scaled back in earlier games by taking a shotgun to its groin, because otherwise NPCs would end up massacring eachother.
My suspicion is that this is because NPCs had exactly three reactions if other NPCs hit them, steal from them, or otherwise triggered a disposition change:
1 "I'm Oblivious!"
2 "Hey, I'm on your side!/I see wut u did there!" (OK, maybe they only said this to the PC, not sure).
3 "GRAAAH! FITE TO DETH PLZKTHX!"
I propose scrapping the first level, and adding some more levels to more accurately reflect reality.
1 "Hey, I'm on your side!/I see wut u did there!" - verbal acknowledgement of wrongdoing and a warning. Important first step in escalating hostilities... or in changing people's behaviour so that they don't need to escalate.
Opponent reactions can be: insult, ignore, apologise but continue with action, apologise and change selected action. "Sorry, I'll be more careful."
2 "What do you think you are doing? Were you born in a Vault?"...etc. Insults are the lowest level of conflict in real life. They do sometimes escalate, but they deal no damage, and conflict at this level has a good chance of defusing itself. It serves the purpose of making the NPC stop his activity and respond instead to the insult.
Opponent reactions can be: bitchslap, insult, ignore, apologise but continue with action, apologise and change selected action. "At least I wasn't born in a brahmin-shed!"
3 *BITCHSLAP* Yeah. You know you want to slap that annoying fan. Well, so do NPCs. Now they get to. A zero-damage physical attack, perhaps with brief stun and knockback, and a deeply satisfying sound. But it's zero damage. Could escalate, but still, not necessarily.
Opponent reactions can be: attack, bitchslap back (should be low %chance, or can get silly like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpHUFzV0
4 "I'm gonna beat you like a redheaded stepchild!" Even when you enter the realm of doing physical damage, there is no earthly reason that anyone would want to fight a friend to the death. Their goal in combat is to beat their opponent until he gives in or falls unconscious - NOT to kill. They won't draw a weapon.
Opponent reactions are prettymuch defend, surrender, or run, like with any combat, but they do have the option to also escalate the combat by drawing a weapon... but this would not be common. Nobody in a bar brawl whips out a gun or a knife. It's just not done. Surrendering on either side is very likely to be accepted, though they might give one last bitchslap or curse.
5 "GRAAAH! FITE TO DETH PLZKTHX!" - Between faction members, there is no earthly reason to fight to the death for anything less than a murder. Even in a fight to the death, NPCs should be able to at least try to surrender to eachother.
Opponent reactions as above. Surrendering on either side might not be accepted, but offering it might move the combat down a notch to just a beating (same mechanism as previous, really).
Hope that makes sense. In human interaction, we have many social tools to prevent violence, and one of those is violence escalation levels. Even in murders, it is very rare indeed for someone to switch straight from normal to a murderous rage - they generally slide through "verbal abuse" and "punishment" first. And the vastly overwhelming majority of people who enter those first two conflict levels do NOT go on to the "murderous rage" step. People carrying weapons do not always draw them in combat: in fact, against friends, they almost never do.
So, it's not just the player who could benefit from nonlethal combat.
But, what about the long term? If someone's beaten someone else unconscious, should that affect their disposition to eachother? Make the NPCs avoid eachother more? Hell, YES! And wouldn't that AI become somewhat more radiant than the one that caused people to leap at eachother's throats constantly?
This is not to say that I think violence should be verboten: not at all. I feel that everything, including children, babies, and the pregnant, should be vulnerable to violence, theft, and all other moral decisions. Why?
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedt
But even the author of the article, horrified by his own actions that he was "forced" to do, mowed them down in their dozens. A morality decision, and one that I admire the game for giving him, even if those two players, myself and Richard Garriot are the only people who might have spotted it.
You can only explore your own morality if you have the ability to make moral choices. Those choices need to include the ability to not kill, that I argued for so vehemently above, and perhaps even the ability to protect - but at the same time, they need to also include the ability to kill. Otherwise, powerless, you are just subject to the morality of the game designer.
The best place to do it safely, of course, is computer games.
I love consequences in my gaming, and like that they not always be made obvious at the outset.
Killing a bandit and finding a baby's bottle on her body. Did the bandit kill the baby and take the bottle? Or did you just kill a mother? This is a subtle consequence. I like subtlety.
You failed to warn the school that the nuke was coming. Later you see a burned out schoolbus - just a part of the scenery, you might think, unless you have played through it before, and did warn the school: in which case, you will remember that there was no school bus. Consequences don't have to be obvious or have effect on gameplay.
Symbiotic relationships are always good: if you cut off the "evil" bit you harm the "good". In the Eragon book and movie, killing an evil dragonrider killed its dragon too. No idea if that was carried on to a moral dilemma in the game, though. Another good example: Jeckyll and Hyde.
Then there's the conflicting interests one. Someone has a wasting illness. They want to die. Someone else cares extremely deeply about them, and is desperately working on a cure, with a very low chance of success, but at least it's a chance. Do you let the person die?
One of the conflicting interests can be you: you and someone who can't swim are on a boat. Boat sinks. You can't carry both your pack of equipment, and the non-swimmer to shore.
Who's more important? Do you betray one friend or a thousand strangers?
Do the ends justify the means? Do you torture people for information, or do without?
Do the ends justify the risks? Do you allow a faction to remain neutral, or assassinate their leader so that the second in command, who is more amenable, will ally the faction with your cause? Is it worth the risk of getting found out, and having the faction go over to the enemy?
I was just following orders! You are told "take Snow White into the woods and kill her." Do you kill her? Refuse? Let her go but lie about it? Flee with her? You are told "torture this man" - do you? (in real life experiments, people would obey the authority figure) Your colleague, told to help you, objects strongly and refuses to take part - do you side with him, or your employer? (in the tests where the subject sees a peer standing up for what's "right", people are able to break from the "obey authority" mindset far easier).
Who do you save? A town with a population of M has a well infected with a fatal disease. You have N doses of a cure. N<<M. Who do you allow to die? If you see and speak with them as their health fails and they die, how will you feel? Will you give up your own dose, and hope that your high health and stack of stimpaks will see you through? Will you give all your stimpaks the dying, even if it will only stretch out their time a little? Will those you give the dose to give their dose to others? If you give it to them in a way that they cannot, will they hate you? Either way, will the survivors feel deep guilt in themselves that they survived?
Who do you spare? Someone with an infectious disease is trying to break out from enforced quarantine for emotional reasons: to be with her dying daughter perhaps. How far are you willing to go to prevent her getting out of quarantine? She might not even be infected!
Bandits, to me, should be a moral dilemma. They are not simple, evil killable mobs. They are people driven to rob from others. Not "attack and fight to the death" - that's just retarded. Why are they so desperate? What are they trying to preserve? If they take the time to explain their situation, would the player help instead of fighting?
Moral conflicts don't need to be purely inside you. You can morally conflict with other people. The paladin in the awesome Goblins comic is a good example: he is sworn to obliterate all goblins, and sees them as irredeemably evil. If he met any goblins from Underworld2, he'd massacre them down to the last baby. But, he's acting out of a strong moral code, to protect what he believes in. Is he evil? Should you fight him?
The Ultima character generation moral dilemmas are interesting. Stuff like:
"You and your friend battle a dragon. He thinks he slew the beast, but you know that you are the one who struck the telling blow. Do you Honestly correct him when he claims the glory for himself? Or Humbly allow him to take credit?"
Its very important, when considering consequences, to remember that the player can lie too! If I say "sure, I'll go kill Bob" I mean "I want the character I have spoken to, to think that I intend to kill Bob", not "when I meet Bob, and talk to him, automatically launch me into a fight to the death with him".
It is also very important to remember that if you make the player take an either-or choice, then even if you have done everything in your power to ensure they don't find a way to make them choose "both!"... you have to be very aware that they might just do so, and you need to code that in as a possible result anyway. "You found enough vaccine for the whole village? That's incredible, I didn't think there was that much in the whole of the wasteland! What did you do, find a cloning bug? ZOMG HAX!"
In one game where you had to choose to put your wife or child into an escape pod, you could pick up the child, and by walking into her, push the wife into the pod while holding the child. The cutscene would start... and she'd be magically outside the pod! Really poor on the part of the game designers.
And also important to ensure that you can't undo what you did: In Larian's "Divine Divinity", I am told, "there was a quest to cure 3 poisoned people in a quarantined area, with only 2 cure potions. This was designed to force you to choose who lived and who would die (though left alone they never actually got sick enough to die). Before a couple cheats were found that could duplicate a cure potion, a German player found that you could either pickpocket a potion back to re-use, or kill a cured person to get them to drop the potion (there was no reputation drop for this, unlike using a direct attack against most friendly NPCs). Whatever method was used, all three quests could be completed, and they would all stay healthy (though the main gate to the quarantine area would remain sealed)". - Coded properly, the potion would either have been drunk and destroyed when used, or would have detected being removed from the inventory, and have him whine about having lost it.
What I’d really, really, dearly love in RPGs is the ability to talk with the people you’re fighting.
So you have the choice not just to kill or run away, but to:
taunt
Successful taunts cause target to enter berserk mode. We already have berserk in Oblivion, taunts in every single FPS since Doom, though admittedly only Duke3D ever did them well tongue.gif
stop fighting and talk out your differences,
Oblivion did this with the "Yield" command, but unfortunately made it related to the opponent's disposition to you, so regardless of your speech skill, you could never successfully yield to someone who had attacked you first, since they "hated" you enough to attack you.
offer them gold if they stop attacking
Not done anywhere yet, but in an engine that has yield and trading, should not be too great a leap.
And not just have you try to start or end the combat: have NPCs:
taunt you
Aka have NPCs cast "berserk" on you, with your speech ability governing your saving throw.
beg for their lives when beaten near death
OK, it's not been done, but how hard is it?
Code:
when npc starts combat
if (NPC's strength) < (0.1 * PC's apparent ferocity)
then
if (npc can flee)
flee
else if (npc can surrender)
surrender
else
fight
when npc takes damage
if NPC is in combat, AND is marked as surrender-capable, AND (HP < 5% OR AMMO == 0)
if (npc can flee)
flee
else if (npc can surrender)
surrender
else
fight
(I say "apparent ferocity" as I feel this should be a combination of things like reputation current health, arms and armour, whether his weapon is holstered, whether he's just defeated anyone nearby in a fight, XP level, charisma, and so on. Comparing the NPC against how strong he thinks the PC is, would be a bit harder to code but more realistic, I feel, than to compare the NPC's real strength against the PC's real strength. It would mean that a wussy or pacifist PC could "fake out" strong characters by just looking buff.
You could get prettymuch infinitely complex, like with anything in a RPG. You could take into account daft stuff like whether the PC's outfit was made of matching pieces, and whether the NPC thought people in uniform were scary, or wusses... but beyond a certain point, the player stops being able to second-guess the results completely accurately, and at that point it becomes "realistic": no point getting any more complex than that. So, a simple "reputation + random roll" might even suffice for most purposes.
Basic flee/surrender/fight decision making, ending combat before death, is not beyond today's technology, would not take ten years to develop, but nobody, so far as I know, has ever done it in any game.
If the NPC is at 3 hp and he's out of ammo he will toss aside his gun and beg for his life damnitt! And if I choose to spare him and let him go, I have to run the risk of him attacking me again when he's healed up and rearmed. And if I choose not to spare him, and people see me killing an unarmed cripple begging for his life, then that could be a problem for me too!
Combine it with what we already know is in engines such as Oblivion: NPCs can pick up stuff when you are in the area. So you spare them, or they flee; they move to the weapon cabinet, grab a healthpack and weapon, and attack again!
If you also make bad guys heal and rearm over time if you leave the area, that would obviously improve realism too.
Have beating someone unconscious with your fists mean something, too: that you have beaten them, disarmed them, but spared their lives and they and people nearby know it: some might consider you hardass but merciful, others might consider you weak for your morality. OK, this hasn't been done yet, but shouldn't take ten years. Past combat affects the opponent's disposition towards you.
This depends on the NPC, and whether you or they fled/surrendered/fell unconscious, and on who started the fight: if they attacked you and you still spared them, that's a possible plus. If you attacked them and they fled, or were beaten unconscious, probably not so much of a plus!
Having people nearby affected could be harder. However, the Oblivion engine has murder detection within a certain range, the Ultima engines have theft detection - can't an engine have "sparing" detection, too?
Stuff like that’d make the decision to kill in combat so much more immersive & meaningful. I am hoping that Oblivion’s yield was just the first step on this road, and I applauded it - but I really hope that it’s taken further in future.
I am so sick, so terribly, terribly sick of fights being to the death, and death being nothing but a source of XP. Nobody in real life has a bar fight to the death, not unless stuff goes really wrong.
NPCs shouldn’t willingly attack someone who can clearly wipe the floor with them, unless they're defending something more important to them than their own life.
Combat should have further repercussions. What if a woman bandit out by a deserted shack demands your food so you kill her, but then you go inside the shack and see a baby in a crib. You killed its mother, and if you leave it there, it will die slowly of thirst/starvation. What do you do? This one doesn't even take any PROGRAMMING! In the construction kit, place female bandit, place baby, bingo, moral dilemma in a can!
You could, with simple scripted rules, add more depth. Take the rule "all children without parents turn feral within one week, have disposition to player reduced, blah blah." So, you kill a guard, then later find his children, gone feral with nobody to look after them. What do you do?
You have the rules: "guard feeds and tortures prisoner daily on schedule. Guard kills prisoner when a set plot trigger happens. Prisoner starves without food for more than two days." So, you spare a guard's life and later see him torturing and killing a prisoner. Or you kill him and find the prisoner. Or never find the prisoner until it's died of thirst anyway... suddenly, your guard-killing has consequences.
If you kill or spare someone, you will affect that person's dependants, lovers, employers, friends, enemies, victims and others.
OK, now this, building a web of relationships between people, is more complex. But... not THAT complex.
Permit NPCs be members of any number of factions (already in most engines).
Extend that by allowing them to have relationships not just with factions, but with characters too.
Give each relation a value from -100 (utter enemy, would love you for killing him) to +100 (close family member, would never forgive you).
If you are seen to have killed a person (using existing theft/murder-detection system), check that person's relationship network, and affect each person [edit: or faction] in the network by that amount.
If the death was a murder, double the amount.
If you want to get really fancy, as well as the relation value, give each character "onOwnDeath" and "onContactdDeath" script hooks so that you can change conversation options and whatnot, as well as just their dispositions. This allows us to modify the above-described hardcoded "all children without parents turn feral within one week" to "dependents who's guardians are dead". No need to restrict to children, can include pets, slaves, etc, who become freed by their master's death, who's disposition to the player may go up, etc.
None of that is rocket science. None is beyond what is plausible. None is 10 years' work. Most of it is maybe 10 days', plus time for voice acting the surrender dialogues. But this, giving meaning to death, is the stuff that separates RPG from FPS.
Now, we have killing optional for PCs... shouldn't NPCs have the same privilege to decide not to kill?
As I understand it, radiant AI had to be scaled back in earlier games by taking a shotgun to its groin, because otherwise NPCs would end up massacring eachother.
My suspicion is that this is because NPCs had exactly three reactions if other NPCs hit them, steal from them, or otherwise triggered a disposition change:
1 "I'm Oblivious!"
2 "Hey, I'm on your side!/I see wut u did there!" (OK, maybe they only said this to the PC, not sure).
3 "GRAAAH! FITE TO DETH PLZKTHX!"
I propose scrapping the first level, and adding some more levels to more accurately reflect reality.
1 "Hey, I'm on your side!/I see wut u did there!" - verbal acknowledgement of wrongdoing and a warning. Important first step in escalating hostilities... or in changing people's behaviour so that they don't need to escalate.
Opponent reactions can be: insult, ignore, apologise but continue with action, apologise and change selected action. "Sorry, I'll be more careful."
2 "What do you think you are doing? Were you born in a Vault?"...etc. Insults are the lowest level of conflict in real life. They do sometimes escalate, but they deal no damage, and conflict at this level has a good chance of defusing itself. It serves the purpose of making the NPC stop his activity and respond instead to the insult.
Opponent reactions can be: bitchslap, insult, ignore, apologise but continue with action, apologise and change selected action. "At least I wasn't born in a brahmin-shed!"
3 *BITCHSLAP* Yeah. You know you want to slap that annoying fan. Well, so do NPCs. Now they get to. A zero-damage physical attack, perhaps with brief stun and knockback, and a deeply satisfying sound. But it's zero damage. Could escalate, but still, not necessarily.
Opponent reactions can be: attack, bitchslap back (should be low %chance, or can get silly like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpHUFzV0
4 "I'm gonna beat you like a redheaded stepchild!" Even when you enter the realm of doing physical damage, there is no earthly reason that anyone would want to fight a friend to the death. Their goal in combat is to beat their opponent until he gives in or falls unconscious - NOT to kill. They won't draw a weapon.
Opponent reactions are prettymuch defend, surrender, or run, like with any combat, but they do have the option to also escalate the combat by drawing a weapon... but this would not be common. Nobody in a bar brawl whips out a gun or a knife. It's just not done. Surrendering on either side is very likely to be accepted, though they might give one last bitchslap or curse.
5 "GRAAAH! FITE TO DETH PLZKTHX!" - Between faction members, there is no earthly reason to fight to the death for anything less than a murder. Even in a fight to the death, NPCs should be able to at least try to surrender to eachother.
Opponent reactions as above. Surrendering on either side might not be accepted, but offering it might move the combat down a notch to just a beating (same mechanism as previous, really).
Hope that makes sense. In human interaction, we have many social tools to prevent violence, and one of those is violence escalation levels. Even in murders, it is very rare indeed for someone to switch straight from normal to a murderous rage - they generally slide through "verbal abuse" and "punishment" first. And the vastly overwhelming majority of people who enter those first two conflict levels do NOT go on to the "murderous rage" step. People carrying weapons do not always draw them in combat: in fact, against friends, they almost never do.
So, it's not just the player who could benefit from nonlethal combat.
But, what about the long term? If someone's beaten someone else unconscious, should that affect their disposition to eachother? Make the NPCs avoid eachother more? Hell, YES! And wouldn't that AI become somewhat more radiant than the one that caused people to leap at eachother's throats constantly?
This is not to say that I think violence should be verboten: not at all. I feel that everything, including children, babies, and the pregnant, should be vulnerable to violence, theft, and all other moral decisions. Why?
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedt
But even the author of the article, horrified by his own actions that he was "forced" to do, mowed them down in their dozens. A morality decision, and one that I admire the game for giving him, even if those two players, myself and Richard Garriot are the only people who might have spotted it.
You can only explore your own morality if you have the ability to make moral choices. Those choices need to include the ability to not kill, that I argued for so vehemently above, and perhaps even the ability to protect - but at the same time, they need to also include the ability to kill. Otherwise, powerless, you are just subject to the morality of the game designer.
morality
I think eventually we will start heading in the direction that you are suggesting.
There are a few people trying to use morality in games. You should check out:
http://www.peacemakergame.com/
Clearly, the majority of games are simply a matter of killing without hesitation...
However, some of the MOST POPULAR games (WoW and the Sims)...certainly use a good bit of morality.
It isn't all bad !
I think if more woman get into game design then
we will see some more games that require morality.
Right now the vast majority of game design is done by men.
I also think that if we only continue to make FPS shoot-em-ups and similar games, that the industry will eventually become stale and predictable (kind of like Hollywood). As MMO's continue to grow in popularity and relevance (I believe that MMO's will eventually wield quite a bit of influence and economic power in the real world) there will need to be new game design that is more in depth than just killing. As the amount of human interaction in online worlds increases, so will the necessity for the virtual expression of real human emotion, connection, and morality.
In the mean time, if you just want to kill some people and get paid to do it, I suggest you check out my favorite website: http://www.GetGosu.com
-cheers
Re: morality
It always startles me a little when someone outside my half-dozen lj-friends comments on one of my posts - particularly the long and tedious ones like this, posted more as aide memoires for myself, than in the expectation that anyone out there could be bothered to read them.
I've not seen any evidence of morality in online gaming, other than the "gamer morality" (a fascinating topic in itself) which relates to things like ganging up, stealing kills, ninja looting, corpse looting, corpse camping, regular camping, etc. But it's just another real life morality call: "don't spoil the fun of other players" - the players, the fun, and the spoiling, are all real-life things.
I'm more interested in virtual morality:, "game-world morals", rather than "game-play morals". And I strongly suspect that single-player games are the best place to find these, though Gariott's games (UO, Tabula Rasa) may both have interesting morality: I've not played either so can't comment.
Black Isle's "Planescape: Torment" (which I'm playing now) is a good example of a game which makes moral distinctions: for example, the dialogue often offers the option to say the same thing as truth or lie. So "Talk or I'll kill you" can be a threat or a bluff. I'm playing it by my preferred morality, and am coming out as "neutral good". I think I may try to play as lawful evil next time, just to see what it's like.
Re: morality
The demonstrated morality may not have anything to do with game design (such as your 'Planescape'
example, which is attempting to include morality in game-play). Anytime people are gathered together and given the ability to communicate amongst eachother, you are going to get good and bad behavior. Nearly everytime that I play Counter-Strike there is an intriguing demonstation of morality.
The scenario usually plays out like this:
a. I log on to a server with a dozen other guys with the intention of killing some terrorists (doesn't that make me a standard-bearer of morality ?) hmm....
b. Inevitabaly someone is doing one of the following:
a. spraying pornography on the walls of the map.
b. cursing.
c. cheating or at least appears to be cheating.
Now, the server may have pre-defined rules as to how the server admin expects people to conduct themselves on the server (most servers don't want you spraying porn and cursing).
So, there is a pre-determination of some basic expectations of how people should conduct themselves in this environment.
In the case of cheating, we get to see a real-time, in-game demonstration. There is a debate in which players on the server will try to determine whether or not the suspected individual is actually cheating. The members of the server are basically acting as a jury and can votekick and or voteban an unwanted user off the server. If an admin is present then they can also ban the unwanted user as soon as a consensus is reached.
So there you have it, questionable moral behavior (cheating), a trial with judge and jury and a decision made all online and all in-game.
Then there is always the debate about admin's that abuse their powers (which happens very often).
Re: morality
What about morality that *isn't* real life? Morality directed at NPCs, instead of players? With MMOGs, it gets in the way of min-maxing your character, which you need to do in order to compete. In a MMOG, if an NPC offered you "half my gold" in return for its life, you wouldn't even have a choice - whip out your sword, take all the gold and the XP for the kill! But even this simple kind of moral quandary doesn't normally occur in MMOGs, which is a shame.
Because, what's new to me, and interesting, surprising and different, is my realisation that I have morality when speaking to a character that I'm completely aware *doesn't exist*, when it is completely impossible for my actions to affect another human: single-player games are the most pure expression of this.
Had you asked me a couple months ago whether my morality affects my singleplayer gameplay choices, I would've laughed, confident that even on a subconscious level, I knew the difference between reality and fantasy. Games, I would've said, are for escapism, so morality is not an issue: they're sandboxes in which everything and anything is fair game. But looking back, I can see that it's always been an issue for me, and speaking to others, it's not uncommon. Though I've not played it, Star Wars: KotOR seems to have been a big one for many people, having a hard time with some of the Dark Side missions, and looking for the "least evil" way to complete it.
It seems that since Origin died there's been a bit of a "dark ages" in exploration of morality in gaming, as MMOs have taken the limelight, and single-player games have been largely restricted to shooters with black & white choices (BioShock), and RPGs with incredibly linear, single-outcome quests (Oblivion). Though again I've not played it, Black & White seems to have been an attempt to explore morality a little, though as the name implies, just "Black & White" morality.
But essentially morality has fallen by the wayside... until now. Fallout 3 is being designed with a significant focus on the "grey areas" of morality: there will often be no "right choice" and even in black and white choices like "do I nuke this town or not?" there are middle-ground paths you can take - at least according to the hype. Another game taking morality seriously is the sequel to Divine Divinity" where they are strongly discussing morality.
And I find it fascinating.