A Superficial Take on Moral Choice in Gaming

I have not played video games for some seven and a half years, which is not coincidentally the length of time I have been a parent. But last week as I shopped in Target a video game entitled Fable: the Lost Chapters caught my eye with the large text on the cover reading "For Every Choice, A Consequence." The cover goes on to read:

"Imagine a world where every choice and action determines what you become. Where you evolve in real time based on every little thing you do…. Your decisions make you a hero, villain, or anything in between."

That seemed cool enough for me to try, and so I did. But I was disappointed. Whether you turn out to be evil or good is pretty simply dependent upon whether you do clearly good things (kill evil beasts in "good quests") or clearly bad things (kill nice people and steal). There's no shade of gray, there's no ambiguity about whether a course of action will prove to have good or bad effects, and little combination of good and bad in a single character in the game. And the effects of your conduct? Why, if you're bad, you grow ugly and sport horns. If you're good, you end up looking wholesome in a beddable Legolas sort of way. If you're bad, nasty insects swarm around you. If you're good, you're followed by butterflies. If you're bad, townspeople boo you. If you're good, they cheer. That's kind of cute, but it's superficial.

Without the merely superficial differences that follow from your conduct, it's just another one of those "hero" games with quests and skills and magic points and yawn yawn yawn. These quests and skills and magic points and so on aren't horrid, but they aren't special, either. If you fail in a particular attempt, you go back to the start of a quest and try again, and again, and again — until you get it right. Controls are complicated enough — Shift+O, or is that Shift+0?, to cycle through spells — that even the developers lost track of whether you should press the right control key or the right shift key to cast a spell when using a mouse… eeeeeergh. What a mess.

The graphics are awfully pretty, with lots of sweeping shots in three dimensions, and multiple sources of light in a single frame, and pauses for cinematic sweeps through landscapes. But watching pretty graphics is not the same as playing a fun game. I know the game makers love to linger over a shot, and would love to tell me about all the skill that goes into making hair move in just the right way, but I don't buy a game for pseudo-real hair. I buy a game (ok, every eight years) to have a fun challenge motivated by the promise of irregular reward and the difficulty of an enterprise that is just slightly beyond me. I thought that this game would be different because of a motivating moral dimension — but that was a disappointing non-difference. Without that difference, Fable seemed pretty run-of-the-mill. Considering that I haven't even played a video game for seven and a half years, I should have been relatively easy to impress. If your gaming habits are more regular, and you're harder to impress, you may end up even more disappointed than I.