Do you defuse the bomb and save Megaton? Or let it explode and take the town with it?
Fallout 3's big decision is memorable for its stark simplicity and big consequences. It should be an easy choice and it certainly seems open-and-shut on the surface. What monster would let a city, and all the people in it, burn? Well, the wages of sin is wealth. Defuse the bomb and you'll earn 300 caps and an apartment in Megaton. But let it explode and your haul increases to 1,000 caps, plus a luxe penthouse in Tenpenny Tower where you can kick your feet up.
Even with incentives, though...
"I could only bring myself to do it once," said Dan Shafer, associate professor of Film and Digital Media at Baylor University and author of Moral Choice in Video Games. "The feeling you get after blowing up the town for the evil Tenpenny is terrible. And, to make it worse, when you go back to the crater where Megaton once stood, you encounter ghouls, former townspeople who weren't killed in the blast, but were turned into mournful zombies. It is gut-wrenching."
If you choose to destroy Megaton, you'll watch it explode in a catastrophic nuclear explosion, resulting in a mushroom cloud rising over Fallout 3's Wasteland.
Shafer isn't alone in his discomfort. Many players are hesitant to become death, the destroyer of worlds. Early last year, John Ebenger, a former cinematic designer at BioWare, stated that only 8% of players chose the Renegade options in the Mass Effect games. Mass Effect's Paragon and Renegade choices don't map perfectly to the Good versus Evil of the Megaton choice, but other developers of choice-based RPGs have observed a similar split.
"That's consistent with the numbers I've seen," Carrie Patel, a senior narrative designer at Obsidian, said, citing one of The Outer Worlds' defining moral choices--whether to turn against the scientist who rescued your character from cryosleep and join forces with the monolithic, hyper-capitalist Board--as an example. "The vast majority of players side with Phineas."
Stephane Beauverger, narrative director on Dontnod's Vampyr, echoed that sentiment.
"According to some statistics we had while working on the project, we learnt that when facing a moral dilemma (invited to choose between a 'good' or a 'bad' decision), about 75% of the players prefer to take the morally high road," Beauverger said via email.
But... why? Video games have famously invited us to rampage. There's even a famous video game called Rampage. So why the unease about making bad choices? Do certain kinds of games evoke guilt? And what kind doesn't? How does the Jaws-simulator Maneater, for example, make it feel effortlessly fun to massacre innocent human beings? How does Carrion's limb-ripping carnage sidestep guilt in favor of glee? By contrast, why do choice-based RPGs--which often ask us to do small unkind acts in the name of roleplaying a villainous character--often leave us with pangs of regret? And how do skilled developers coax players over the moral threshold?
To answer those questions and more, we need to take a closer look at the work developers do to create compelling games, and the work psychologists and academics have done to help us better understand the engines that power moral choice.
As Crypto, the alien invader protagonist of Destroy All Humans!, you, uh...destroy a fair number of humans in some pretty hilarious ways.
Humanize The Monster, Dehumanize The Humans
In 2020, the games industry produced a bumper crop of titles that cast players as literal monsters. Maneater, Carrion, Destroy All Humans!; each cast players as human-killing creatures and gave them permission to go wild. David Sallman, who worked as lead game designer on Black Forest Games' remake of Destroy All Humans!, in which players take on the role of a hilariously murderous extraterrestrial, laid out a simple roadmap for getting players to identify with humanity's adversaries.
"Reducing humans to caricatures, basically dehumanizing them, is a first step to do this," said Sallman. "Another step is to then humanize the aliens.... Giving alien protagonists depth and taking it away from humans helps establish the congruent goals between the player and [alien protagonist] Crypto from a ludonarrative standpoint. Humans that are portrayed with some extent of depth are almost exclusively evil, giving the player a justification to go after them."
In other words, sometimes being a member of the same species isn't enough to get on a player's good side. In fact, players often naturally develop kinship with the character they're playing, even if that character is a massive red blob of teeth and tentacles.
"I think it's actually easier than it sounds. Just by giving the player control over the creature or the villain, you automatically kind of start being somewhat sympathetic to the character, at least to some extent," said Krzysztof Chomicki, game and level designer for Phobia Studios' Carrion, in which players control a tentacle-slinging blob creature that eats people to grow larger and more dangerous. Chomicki recalled experiencing something similar while playing the Alien versus Predator games in the early 2000s.
"Mostly because I was allowed to play as the Predator, I formed this kind of bond [with] that character, which doesn't happen when something is just the villain. When you just go around shooting xenomorphs, you may think they are cool, but you don't necessarily feel sympathetic towards them. I guess this is kind of what's going on in Carrion: just by giving players control of the blob-like creature, they automatically start caring for it. It becomes this kind of Tamagotchi."
Maneater is full of gory, ridiculous kills as you patrol its beaches looking for hapless human victims as a giant shark--but the game plays all dismemberment for comedy rather than horror.
And, as Bill Munk, game director on Tripwire Interactive's Maneater, points out, games don't exist in a vacuum. Players take to controlling the murderous, human-chomping shark in Maneater, in part, because they have internalized the popular mythology of the shark as communicated by Discovery Channel's Shark Week and films like Jaws, The Shallows and Sharknado.
"In a way, we have popular shark fiction to thank for making Maneater's main character so effective," Munk said. "When players have spent so much time sharing their fear of sharks with the characters they see in movies and TV, and then they are given the chance to become that shark they've spent so much time fearing, they naturally unlearn [that fear] because we've presented them with the opportunity to detach from that fear and step into the shoes of the monster that's creating it."
"In the end, killing humans isn't the fun part of the game. Killing humans is a vehicle for the fun part."
"The idea of Maneater being a hilariously narrated nature documentary that emphasizes the real beauty of sharks contrasted with the hateful views of the shark-murdering villain, Scaly Pete, does a lot to also remind players that, in real life, we are more of a danger to sharks than they are to us. It flips the script a little bit and allows the player to start to empathize. Then we make Scaly Pete kill the player shark's mom, and suddenly everyone is out for blood."
In action games, players are accustomed to accepting that they have to kill all the bad guys. Often, those bad guys are other humans. The justification for why you have to kill them all may be good (they're Nazis and they're shooting at me!), or it may be flimsy (they're in my way!), but humans are and have basically always been a common enemy type in video games. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference in our moral calculations if our own avatar is human, too.