Morality in a video game - Dragon's Age: Origins

There's a part in the Warden's Keep expansion of Dragon's Age: Origins where you're given a pretty complex moral dilemna.
You're in a demon-infested old fortress slaughtering the undead when you run into a demon who's taken possesion of a long dead general. The demon doesn't attack you. It asks for parley and explains that in possesing the general, it has taken the general's memories as well and were it not for the barrier that's keeping the demon in the tower, it would go out to all the places in the general's memories just to experience everything and feed on some mortal souls in the process. The demon says that it will close the breach in the barrier between this world and the demon world if you agree to let it go out into the world. It's a trade of one loose demon to prevent a mass exodus. The demon sends you into a tower and tells you to kill everything in it: "grind the tower into dust if you can."
You then meet the counter-proposal, an old mage who has been experimenting on his soldiers, fellow men, and demons for over a hundred years to extend his life and grant him greater power. His excuse is that he's been fighting the demons in the tower and keeping them from going out into the world.
The game gives you a chance to decide for yourself after hearing both parties stories. I found the mage to be the more evil of the two, but I had a few secondary motives.
1. The demon also promised to reveal the location of a secret stash of gold if you helped it.
2. I wanted to get the most amount of experience points out of the whole situation.*
3. I wanted to see if I could kill the old mage badass. The demon seemed like less of a challenge.
4. It's a video game, not real life.

I ended up killiing the mage and helping the demon. (Actually I would have killed the demon and mage both if I thought I could get the stash and kill the demon in order to get max experience points. The game tends to not let you attack people you talk to unless you're given an "attack" dialogue option). I did it for the cash. I did it for the experience and the glory. I figured one demon let out into the real world wasn't going to cause as much trouble as a power-crazed mage willing to sacrifice his fellow man to live longer. Actually the game world has a lot of different groups that hunt demons, so it's possible to assume that others could have eventually taken the demon down, and I felt sorry for the demon a little bit. Demons and spirts are trapped in a world called The Fade where anything they think becomes reality but they lack the imagination to make anything other than what they already see.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Demons are obsessed with the human world because there's so much there that they don't have. The Fade has no hardships for one with great power, but the hardships of the natural world give humanity its complexity, imagination, and ingenuity. I felt sorry for the demon, but in the back of the mind I was thinking, "The game won't remember this."

In the same way that you crash into someone's car in GTA or some other Rockstar game, and you don't get out and trade insurance information. That car is gonna dissapear after you travel a certain amount of feet away. Games constantly erase and recreate people. I let this demon out, I'm not likely to see the consequences of that action because it's a game. One character said later, "You've probably not seen the last of that demon," and I actually got excited like "Ooh! I wonder what happens. I wonder what it will do." At the end of your time playing a game, you turn it off and maybe a choice you've made in a game haunts you later. This has happened to me. I have lived down actions in games for days, wracked with guilt (In Arcanum, many players have confessed to killing the nice old man near the beginning of the game who lets the player stay in his house in the forest and gives you some work to do. The old man gives a fair amount of experience and a very useful item when killed and there's no one around to see you do it. Guilt.)

The other thing that's interesting about this whole situation is the context. In the game world, the whole country is about to be attacked by a dragon and its goblin horde. The attack can only be stopped if your character can kill the dragon and stop the invasion, which makes you pretty damn important in the moral relativism of things and the more powerful you can become, the better the chance you can save the world. What's are the lives of one demon's victims worth compared with the lives of the country and continent?

Complicated moral choices like this make a game like this interesting as hell even though it's just a game. Compare that with a movie where the male lead chooses to side with the mage only to be betrayed and attacked. Stupid male lead. I wouldn't have done things that way. Stupid male lead, your belief in codes of honor is going to get a lot of people killed.

Compare this whole situation with another game I recently forced myself to stop playing (I stupidly pledge to finish any game I start no matter it's cost in time) called Yakuza 3 where the game crammed the moral good of being an overbearing parent and not judging people by their looks down my throat. The moral decision above was part of an optional quest. The following was part of the main story, as in I had to willingly press buttons and spend time to go through the long cutscenes and pointless walking from area to another in order to progress the game and I thereafter forced myself to find a new game to play.

When a game seems like work or a pointless assembly that you have to sit through for work, then you shouldn't be playing it.

The main character has retired from his life of being a Yakuza gangster (for further reference see Yakuza 1 & the much less fun Yakuza 2) in order to run the orphanage he was raised in. In the orphanage, a young darker -skinned boy takes a liking to an older lighter-skinned girl and wants to take her to the movies, but unfortunately she doesn't seem to reciprocate. The gangster and his friend go out to buy the darker-skinned (sorry to repeat this so often but it will be important to the story later) younger boy new clothes to wow the older girl. Neither the gangster nor the friend knows anything about fashion, so the new clothes don't work (given a choice, this player would have tabled that idea from the start although it does give a short cutscene of a little boy dressed up in a cowboy hat and t-shirt made from the American flag. Giggle. Giggle.). The older girl gives the younger boy the cold shoulder and instead goes out with her friends. The gangster, being a sound father figure with nothing else to do with his time, then decides to follow the girl into town to see what she's doing with her friends (the player's skill involved here is exploring the town to find out where the goddamn movie theater is as the map does not explicitly state where it is. The player feels proud of his/her ability to randomly roam around until a cutscene triggers.). The gangster catches up with the girl and her friends about to enter a movie theater, but after catching sight of the older girl's stain from being scalded by a stove, the girl's friends call her ugly and push her to the ground (you would think that her friends would have seen and accepted the scar before, but then you'd be forgetting that some games/movies have convenient memories about their characters prior to the game/movie's beginning). The friends enter the movie theater, leaving the older girl crying in a public street. The gangster is about to intercede when the darker-skinned younger boy steps in and comforts the older girl saying "You're scarred on your arm? Look at me! I'm scarred and dark all over!" The gangster talks it over with his friend and believes that the older girl will understand the younger boy's feelings now. The two are seen talking together amicably.

This is not a bad lesson in itself, but it's a very shallow discussion of a very deep problem. Not to mention heavy-handed and preaching to the choir and what makes it less effective as a morality preaching technique is there was no choice on the part of the player whatsoever nor did the situation seem realistic in the context of urban Japan. Discrimination is subtle. Most kids know better than to openly and violently attack someone they see as lesser than themselves because of physical characteristics, and our lead is so worried about his charges experiencing heartbreak that he follows them and breaches their privacy instead of waiting for them to come to him for help. It's flat. It's unimaginative and feels unrealistic. It's also not very interesting for the player as the player can do nothing in this situation but watch his/her avatar make decisions for him/her. It's something you would see in a movie rather than something you might play in a video game.

IT TOOK OVER AN HOUR OF DULL EYES AND SLACK POSTURE TO GET THROUGH THIS AND THERE WAS NO BRAWLING WHATSOEVER WITHIN THAT TIME WHICH IS THE GAME'S ENTIRE DRAW! STREET BRAWLS! SMASH PEOPLE THROUGH WINDOWS! USE A TRAFFIC CONE TO BASH SKULLS! BE MOTHERFUCKING GANGSTA! IN A CUTSCENE OF THE FIRST GAME, THE MAIN CHARACTER USES A DOORMAN AS A HUMAN SHIELD AGAINST AN UZI BURST THEN THROWS THE DOORMAN AT THE UZI-WIELDER TO SUBDUE HIM! THEN THE PLAYER FIGHTS A SERIES OF GOONS! THE CHARACTER HAS A HEAT GAUGE THAT POWERS UP WHEN YOU DO COOL STUFF AND MISSY ELLIOT'S "I'm really really hot" WAS ON AND I WAS REALLY INTO BUSTING HEADS AT THAT MOMENT! THAT'S GOOD GAMING, SON!

Then you could compare all of this with a game like God of War where the player can't make moral choice either, but is instead drawn to the game by the morality of the character a.k.a. throw the blame on others and go kill them, but Kratos is a more complicated character. Born a Spartan, his only recourse for pain and regret is murder, and by the end of the third game he starts to understand "more murder, more problems" and begins to accept that he's his own greatest enemy, but where does that leave you? How does one escape one's habits and forgive oneself? The fourth game is coming out sometime.

The Last Starfighter was a terrible weapon that wiped out an entire race a la Ender's Game, Xenocide, etc.