COLUMN: Design Diversions - Fate/Stay Night: Choices Beyond Good and Evil
July 6, 2010 12:00 PM |
[‘Design Diversions’ is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Andrew Vanden Bossche. It looks at the unexpected moments when games take us behind the scenes, and the details of how game design engages us. How do we get over our fixation on good and evil as a gameplay element? Fate/Stay Night, a Japanese visual novel, may have the answer.]
A game doesn't need to have moral choices to be a game about moral choices.
Literature has done quite a fine job of it long before we had video games. Macbeth certainly didn't need a message telling him he lost karma after committing regicide. As players, we're stuck between our need for feedback and exhaustion at the lack of subtlety offered us.
Speaking of Fallout 3, the Tenpenny tower and the way the game rated actions as good or evil did not sit at all well with a great deal of players, who were very frustrated when acts they perceived as good were marked by the game as evil. The flip side of this sort of angry reaction to the game is that Fallout 3 succeeded in captivating players through its narrative. But it did this by offering players choices, not by judging them.
Getting away from the stark good and evil we see in so many videogames is harder than it sounds. It is etched into western culture in everything from religion to film, literature and comics. From Dante (the Italian one) to Star Wars, this binary is subject everyone recognizes. It is just so easy to recognize, so ingrained in our culture, that when a videogame throws throws it in a players face they know that they have a choice, and they know that their choice matters.
Categories: Column: Design Diversions