Games have been implementing “alignment” and “morality” systems for some time now.  However, I feel that the approach up till now has been slightly flawed. 

What I am referring to is the developer's love of making alignment bars, karma points, or other similar systems that quantify or measure morality in games.   Now, from a gameplay perspective this can be completely justified.  KOTOR used it to determine what force powers were available to you, and Fallout had karmic points that quantified exactly how good or evil you were to determine interactions with NPC’s.

 That's fine, but from a role playing point of view, it’s unsatisfying.  In real life we find that morality is confusing, debatable, and most importantly, ambiguous.  I think games could benefit from this perspective in their design.  Games should not show your karma go +1 when I help a stranger or -4 when I kill a puppy.  The game shouldn't show you a slider that shows my exact progress on the spectrum of good vs. evil. 

Why?  The main point, I believe, is that morality should be up to the player.  They are the ones shaping and molding their avatar into the person they want, and they are the ones making the choices behind them.  They should be the ones to decide exactly how evil the act of killing the thief may be compared to trying to negotiate with them, or even maybe decide it isn’t evil at all.   The player shouldn’t have to try to guess the morality of the choices presented to them.  This can lead to the player picking a moral choice guess which choice the developer or game is leading them, which is problematic.

Here is a quick and dirty example.  Say the player has an avatar in a game that has a point based morality system that will show you after your choice how good or evil the decision with a point value.  The player is trying to role-play as a crusader against darkness, completely pure of heart and never even flirting with evil.    Presented with a moral choice, the game creates this schism between the morality of the player and the game.  The player knows which choice is the most moral in his/the avatar's eyes, but instead he puts that aside to GUESS what he thinks the game will rate as the most “good” choice.  In the end he may make a choice he feels is actually not moral but that he knows the game will label as good and moral.  Now the way he views his avatar and how the game views his avatar are different and conflicting with each other.  The thought and consequences behind morality has been reduced to a guessing game.

To avoid this problem, I think that games should move away from tracking or quantifying morality.  They should absolutely allow the player to have freedom to make moral decisions, and they can certainly have NPC’s react appropriately to whatever action the avatar takes in the virtual world appropriate to that world, but they shouldn't have the GAME itself pop up and say “No, that was actually an evil choice!” when you did what you thought was a good act.  Let the player come to their own conclusion about what they have just done.  Maybe immediately after killing someone the player realizes they did something wrong, but let them figure that out on their own.  Don’t decide for them.