gamedesign.dev: Alignment

A classic video game hero is a bold and chivalrous champion who can infiltrate the enemy's base, defeat their leader, save the nation, and get the girl (or guy if you swing that way). But maybe you don't want to play that. Maybe you want to play a blackhearted rogue who does it for the money. Maybe you want to lead the nation not out of a sense of justice, but a lust for power. Maybe, in short, you're not heroic at all.

Now, in real life, if you did that, you'd be sent to prison (or maybe given a seat in politics). But hey, we're talking about a video game, so most people will let you do that! And from this, the alignment system is born. Most people will probably have been introduced to it from the games of Peter Molyneux, such as Black & White and Fable, although this has been around since early D&D. Basically, what it means is that you have a choice at any given point to take a course of action in line with one of the alignments, usually "good" and "evil" respectively. For example, when being rewarded for doing something, you can either accept the reward, turn it down (good), or demand more (evil).

The problem comes when people can't accurately gauge what a "good" or "evil" character can do. Anyone who's taken a philosophy class knows that the two points can vary greatly between different societies, such that mercy, typically a "good" value, may be seen as evil, while greed, typically considered "evil" may be seen as good. In a worst-case scenario, developers may just make the options for these alignments almost cartoonishly overblown, so in the above scenario, rather than turning down the reward, the good option would be to give them your own money, and the evil option would be to decapitate them for wasting your time.

My most annoying examples come from Fable 2, which is an otherwise decent game marred by seriously annoying plot. As part of the main plot, you sign up with the main antagonist's army to infiltrate and rescue an important prisoner. During this time, you are outfitted with a kind of shock collar that activates if you disobey the commands of your superiors, draining your experience. This effectively amounts to a number of cutscenes that are "act evil or lose experience". This would be merely annoying for a sidequest, but as part of the main quest, it's simply stupid. There's literally no benefit to acting good, gameplay-wise. Hell, there's no benefit to acting evil either, it's just that you're punished for one and not the other. If you must offer alignment choices, don't make one objectively better than the other mechanically. Gamers might like having choice with the plot, but most of them will choose in-game rewards over sticking to their preferred faction, especially if they can easily negate their alignment shift by doing something minor somewhere else.

An easy fix for the first problem, that of good and evil being subjective, is to just not use good and evil as the alignments, and let players go with options they might like the most. One example that was brought to my attention earlier in my life was the Shin Megami Tensei titles, in which the chief alignments were not good and evil, but law and chaos. Law storylines in SMT titles usually involves instating a powerful regime, usually the Judeochristian YHVH, as the ruler of humanity, ensuring peace and order for a millenium, but removing those who would disagree, either by crusade or brainwashing. Chaos, on the other hand, typically involves unseating figures of authority, usually through very violent means, but ensuring that everyone is free to do what they like in the future. These games almost always offer a chance to play through without following either path, staking a claim to the future as your own self without any ethical or factional obligations, but pitting you against both law and chaos.

Speaking of factions, another example that interests me is the new release of Fallout: New Vegas. There's a good-evil alignment system there as well, but the chief decider of the plot comes more from interacting with the factions of the world. Bethesda games usually take this route, where your dealings with assorted factions determine your character more than ethical questions. In this example, law and chaos as described in SMT are loosely associated with the New California Republic and Caesar's Legion, respectively, although there are several other factions with varying power that you can choose to ally with or destroy. These, in my opinion, are better ways to build your character than abstract alignment systems, because it keeps with the verisimilitude of the setting more effectively if the best barometer for your actions is which groups, with their own ideas of good and evil, would approve or disapprove of your actions, as opposed to some abstract ideal.

I once entertained an idea for a modification to 3.5e D&D (probably inspired by the webcomic Goblins) where rather than having a good or evil alignment, you could choose to associate with a faction, which would cause alignment-based powers to read you as "good" according to allied factions and "evil" to hostile ones. A big problem with 3.5e was the paladin class having to act good at all times, to the point that they simply could not travel with evil characters, and having a system like what I've described seems much more interesting to me, since you could really get a lot of political undertones going when doing things against what the leaders wish despite keeping in line with what the people of a faction represent, rather than making an abstract judgment call.