In mid-October, we announced that the Level Up staff had taken its talent across the pond to the respected U.K. gaming magazine Edge, in the form of a monthly column titled "Playing in the Dark." It had always been our intent to expand on the topics raised in those columns here on Level Up under the rubric The Edge of Reason, but you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men. Our other favorite cliché is "better late than never," so with that, today's installment will tackle our very first Edge column, which ran in the November 2007 edition of the magazine under the title "Why It Feels Good to Be Bad" (click here to read the column in its entirety). In it, we pointed out that while videogames have become fairly accomplished at making us feel good about what we're doing, there's a whole lot more they could explore by making us feel bad about our actions. Here's an excerpt of what we wrote:

While we’re playing, games may challenge us, frustrate us, torment us, even enrage us, but at the end of it all, we’re generally meant to be left with a feeling of exhilaration and a sense of accomplishment. But what about games that make us feel bad? I don’t mean whether or not you cried when Aeris was killed in Final Fantasy VII. I mean a game that manages to make you feel ashamed about something you’ve done.

I had occasion to consider this recently when my friend and fellow blogger, MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, wrote a post about his experience playing the final case in Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney 2: Justice For All. In it, the titular player-protagonist, whose clients have all in fact been innocent, comes to believe that he is now defending a guilty man, yet he must continue to do so to the best of his ability. Totilo wrote that unlike other games that had tried and failed, Phoenix Wright 2 had succeeded in making him feel like a bad guy. In a comment on Totilo’s blog, I asked: ‘How would you feel about an entire series of Phoenix Wright games based around this concept: a lawyer game in which your entire client roster--conmen, polluters, thieves, harassers, murderers, embezzlers and war criminals--were guilty, and your job was to secure their acquittals? Would you play Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Gaiden: The Ends Justify The Means? Would it be fun for you?'

Advertisement

Certain other bloggers have already begun to discuss the issues that our column raises. As we'd written previously in our Vs. Mode exchange on BioShock and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, the very first presentation of the Little Sister Harvest-or-Rescue dilemma had us so conflicted that we actually called family and friends for guidance. Yet as our playthrough continued, each subsequent harvesting became much less emotionally fraught, making us wonder whether there wasn't more that 2K Boston/Australia could have done to keep us feeling just as tormented upon the sixth Harvesting as the first, if not more so.

Part of the reason most people don't kill or murder in real life is that there are real life consequences: social sanction, ostracism, retaliation, incarceration, capital punishment. In games, there are no real life consequences to in-game decisions made regarding AI characters. You won't be labeled, shunned, jailed or executed. Even the in-game consequences are minor; for all of our whining legitimate complaints about 2K Boston/Australia privileging Rescuers over Harvesters by exclusively bestowing upon them the Hypnotize Big Daddy plasmid, it wasn't what we'd consider a hefty punishment.

But what if developers attempted to bring social sanction into the experience? What if your Gamertag were designated "Child Killer" for having murdered the Little Sisters--or "Good Samaritan" for having saved them? Microsoft recently announced its plans to add the Facebook and MySpace-inspired feature of allowing you to browse your friends' Friends Lists; what if everyone on your Friends List were notified each time you killed a Little Sister--or every time you rescued one--like the Status Updates on Facebook? What if the game maintained a list of everyone you killed in the game, including their names, ages, pre-Adam pictures and a description of how you killed them, for all of your friends to peruse at their leisure? If your peer group were "watching" you, if the Xbox Live community or the entire Internet could keep tabs on your videogame morality, would it change how you played games?

This concept has implications not only for the person playing the game, but also for everyone on that person's Friends List. If one of your friends were harvesting Little Sisters, would you rebuke them? Attempt to persuade them to stop? Or would you stay silent, and in doing so, would your silence make you virtually complicit in their digital amorality? If we extend this thought experiment to other games that give players a wider range of choice, like Grand Theft Auto or Mass Effect, how would you respond if you were notified that one or more of your friends were jacking cars, beating up hookers or killing cops? Perhaps a virtual Temperance Union might emerge in Liberty City (or a Krogan Defense Force in the case of Mass Effect), with a small number of gamers encouraging and/or shaming the larger GTA IV player base to refrain from immoral behavior within the game. If that happened, what would you say if one of your friends adopted that philosophy and was playing GTA IV in as law-abiding a manner as possible? Would you encourage them—or taunt them?

The meaningfulness of such a system depends on how each of us views games: as a Rorschach blot which reveals something about who we are deep down inside; as a laboratory in which we can safely experiment with behavior in which we'd never engage in the real world; or as a disposable form of entertainment with no greater implications whatsoever. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, and as fans of virtual experimentation, we're generally not in favor of systems that would inhibit players' testing of virtual boundaries. But our proposal would be voluntary, an optional choice for those gamers who want to give developers more ways to make them feel bad. And while developers have more work to do on their own side of the ledger, having access to tools like these that would let them enlist us gamers as part of their process of emotional engineering might not be a bad idea at all.