The Consequences of Our Actions

Editors' note: I'd like to see more real consequences in games. If I'm a royal dick, I'd like to see the townspeople shun me or the merchants to decline to sell to me. So would Jazz. What about you? -Jason

We've all heard the arguments that playing video games compels us to misbehave, and we all know that's complete B.S. If someone's going to steal, chances are they were going to steal whether they did it in a game or not. But I wonder if some games could do more to urge us against violent actions.

I wrote this because my mother and I had to go out and pick up my brother who, with his friends, had been detained by the police and entered into their databases for attempted burglary. I guess that's influencing my writing.

How do we use games as a teaching tool against rash actions? Well, the first genre that I would look to would be open-world games where you get to choose to be good or evil (Fable, Fallout 3). Now, I wouldn't prevent people playing through as evil, because that’s part of the fun of these games, but I would make evil much more realistic.

Maybe if you try to kill an innocent man in a town and fail, you would spend the game-time equivalent of a week in jail.

Because of that week in jail, maybe you would miss out on a time-specific sidequest that would now be unavailable. The town members would always remember what you did; they would even make sure that someone follows you around whenever you're in town. Word of what you attempted would even spread to surrounding towns, and in other places merchants would refuse to sell to you.

There you go -- the player would now understand that their character's actions affect his life throughout the game, and the game hasn’t become one big boring cliché lesson.

However, this approach to in-game consequence has been tried before, and it failed horribly. I can’t remember where I heard this, so I can’t be sure of its accuracy, but word was that when Lionhead was developing Fable 2, they played around with a similar long-term effect system.

In the period that you’re a kid in that game, if bullies were to jump you and you severely lost the fight, then for the rest of the game, you could have a huge scar across your face. Everyone you meet would treat you differently because of that scar.

Thing was that during testing, testers became so angry that they were being affected from something early on that after losing an early fight, they would unplug the system before it had a chance to autosave!

The sad thing is that I can easily visualize this. Why would gamers react so rashly? Well, that’s obvious. People game for escapism, and knowing this, I must admit that I think my ideas might be a little far-fetched. However, I would just once like to see, maybe in a sim game, that when you don’t pay your rent, you get bad credit, and then you can't get the best TV in the game.

So what do you guys think? Am I a visionary or just insane? Would you welcome consequence in game or fight against it?

(8)

Jazz English

August 10, 2009

sorry about the awful formatting. I'm trying to edit it, but every time I open the bloging tool my web browser crashes.>:(

Brian Shirk

It's all good. I recommend just typing it in Microsoft Word and then copy and paste. I haven't had much of a problem when I do that. The only errors I've ran into is it sometimes deletes spacing between the title of my bulleted lists, but that's it.

As for your blog, those are some interesting ideas. I think having actual consequences would certainly cause players to play differently, but I'm not certain it'd affect their actions in real life. It might make them think momentarily, but I don't think most people make the connection between what occurs on screen and real life unfortunately. Like you said, many people use video games strictly as a form of escapism or entertainment, so they may take it as seriously as a James Bond movie.

Yay, format fixed! eye am t3h master!

@shirk, I would hope that such a game would have the good action domino effect. Ya know those commercials where someone sees someone do something nice and then they do it and it spreads like a virus. That's what this type of game would ideally be, a virus;)

Lance Darnell

August 11, 2009

@Jazz - Great article, and you are definitely insane!! ;)

You raised some good points. Perhaps young kids who have committed petty crimes could be rehabilitated by playing a specialized video game. A game that forces them to play the role of the innocent, and they must deal with people committing the same crimes to them, as they did to people in real life. Perhaps this would allow people to emphasize with others? Because that is what I think is the most dangerous part of gaming, the idea that no one is real but the player, and sometimes I think that feeling transfers to the real world..... its sad!

Rob Savillo

August 12, 2009

It's interesting that you reference Fallout 3. The original Fallout does exactly what you describe -- there's a location called Junktown, and if you break the law there the makeshift police force will lock you up in jail for a night. You could try to break out of jail or serve your sentence. Breaking out of jail, or just breaking the law enough times, will cause the entire town to be hostile towards you for the rest of the game.

Jay Henningsen

From what I've been reading, the new Bioware MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic will force players to make decisions that will have noticable impact on the character. As far as I know, how wide ranging these effects will be has yet to be discovered. Since it is an MMO, you'll be forced to start another character if you want to do things differently. The only thing that worries me about this approach is what will happen if there is gear that can only be obtained by making certain choices that is better than the reward offered by the other choice. I'd hate to have to start over if I missed out on something critical for my character.

When I play single-player offline games I prefer to be able to restore previously saved games. While having consequences for actions sounds good in theory, my time for gaming is limited so I often don't have the time or the desire to play through games more than once. For this reason, I often get annoyed at games with autosave features I can't turn off or games that don't allow me multiple save slots for the same character (I'm looking at you, Fable 2!)

Daniel Feit

I would be wary of playing any game that threatened me with such severe consequences for misbehavior. I like the idea of having NPCs respond to my character differently depending on how I behave (the absence of this is my biggest complaint in BioShock) but why would I bother playing a game where I have to risk sitting in a jail cell? The only way that would be tolerable is if going to jail opened up new criminal opportunities that were unavailable outside. Otherwise, I would completely reload a saved game when facing "arrest."

Games are intentionally designed to be consequence-free environments. If they weren't, we'd all have to start the game over when we died.

@Rob, really, wow, I'm gona have to pick up fall out then.

@jay, I see this type of game making so that if you could obtain a item at a certain time, but end up making it so that your character cant play sufficiently for that day, then you miss the item. However, in order to obtain the item, you'll just have to wait for the specific event to repeat, or for another event with the same item to begin. I'm not familiar with MMOs so this is just based on my little understanding of them.

@Daniel, Well, I think of the jail cell being like jail is in Grand theft auto. you get arrested and then your on the streets again instantly, but the in game time has passed a week.

WHAT THE HECK IS A BITMOB?