Earlier this week, I wrote about fumbling a baddie, i.e.mishandling a crucial conversation with Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3 so badly that he left my party. In that piece, I talked about how the negative feelings a work of art can give us are a gift. Sticking with the decisions that made Astarion angry enough to ditch me was worth it, because it meant that I was experiencing the breadth of what the game had to offer, not just save-scumming until I got the best outcomes.
I submitted that article, logged off Slack, and then the next morning saw that my fellow features editor Tessa Kaur had replied with a Reddit thread detailing the problem I ran into in my playthrough and how to fix it. Armed with a possible solution, I couldn’t resist the urge to load my old save and redo the conversation so that I could keep Astarion on Team Tav.
Make Good Choices… Or Don’t?
This impulse to optimize video game choices for the most pleasant outcome isn’t unusual. In fact,developers who make RPGs often say that most players can’t handle making bad decisions in games. They develop a ton of content that players can only see if they break bad, and but only a tiny fraction of the playerbase ever sees it for themselves.
I actuallywrote about thisback when I was a freelancer, for which I interviewed developers of both action games and RPGs about this phenomenon. I noticed a split between how players approach morality in the two genres. In action games, it seemed to be easier to embrace villainous behavior because the player rarely had much say in the matter. InManeater, for example, you play as a killer shark who eats people. The main verb is chomp. That’s all you’re able to really do.
But RPG developers noted that the vast majority of players chose the “good” options, while only a tiny minority are willing to get their hands dirty. We want to be nice, but more importantly, we fear locking ourselves out of important content by being mean. If a game gives you the option to do good, being bad takes more willpower.
Games Are The One Medium That Can Make Us Feel Guilt
Interactive artistic mediums, like video games and board games, are the only ones that can tap into these feelings. I might feel bad when a character dies in a movie, but I don’t feelculpable. If I kill an innocent character in an RPG, though, Idobear responsibility. I don’t actually need to feel bad about it; it isn’t real, and games can provide a helpful virtual outlet to explore feelings we don’t want to spill into our real lives. But knowing thatnuking Megatonisn’t actually causing any real harm doesn’t necessarily spare you from real guilt.
Some people (I’m one of them) have the tendency to overanalyze the choices they make, and lie awake at night feeling bad that they might have hurt someone’s feelings or done something bad unintentionally. That’s the nature of trying to be a good person — sometimes you miss the mark, and the moral vigilance that helps you choose to do good things can turn inward and castigate you when you fail.
With their virtual representations of moral choices, video games can tap into that same self-flagellating impulse. And though we know they aren’t real and don’t actually matter, the vigilance that keeps us from doing bad things in real life can’t just be switched off. Believe me, I wish it could. I want to be evil in a video game so frickin' bad. I’m missing so much content!
