Light and Dark, Good and Evil, Angels and Demons, oh my. I can’t speak for others, but I can recall many of the make believe games and entertainment of my childhood involving clear-cut distinctions between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. Remember Cops and Robbers? How about Cowboys and Indians? Ah, how easy things were then. Then I caught on that The Lone Ranger’s sidekick was a bit different…wait, wasn’t he an Indian? Oh no! How does that work? I’ve since come to realize that people aren’t so simple.

There have recently been quite a few games that deal with topics that most people shy away from, and I specifically mean morality here. Shall we move on to some case studies? Let’s.

Mass Effect is one game that I’m sure most people reading this have at least heard of. The protagonist, Shepard, is constantly making decisions based on the mainly benevolent Paragon path, or the ruthlessly efficient Renegade path. Either way you go, your ultimate goals remain the same, the difference is that the renegade path utilizes any means to achieve that goal, whereas the Paragon options often involve more peaceful and harmonious actions. Still, Shepard is a soldier, and a soldier’s work is combat; the paragon options do not make one a saint, nor do the renegade decisions make you some sort of monster. Whether you act like a rational human being or a cold-hearted machine working to complete your mission at all costs, you get it done. How you get there affects you, certainly, and other things around the universe, as we see in the second installment. Shepard, in whatever shape or form, manages to be successful without too much angst or moralizing over these dilemmas-that’s the player’s job.

Dragon Age had many cases where the player had some difficult choice to make to progress to the ultimate goal. You were also exposed to the choices others made, and their rationalizations were at times quite horrible. How about that Brood Mother, hmmm? I can’t mention too many of these, to avoid spoilers, but if you’ve played it you know what I’m talking about; and if you haven’t, you should.

Bioshock also employs morality, though perhaps to a lesser extent. You can save the Little Sisters or harvest their organs with your bare hands to get the parasites that provide the ADAM. It doesn’t have a huge effect on the story, though I think it changes how you get through one later stage, and the ending.

Ok, on to the meat and potatoes of this little piece…queue the John Williams score… It’s nearly impossible to discuss modern day morality without invoking the Holy Trilogy, and so I will not attempt to do so. George Lucas originally intended the rebellion and the Empire to be clearly Good and Evil, in a very simplistic manner, and for the first film, he succeeded. The second and third films continued to flesh out “certain  points of view” concerning Good and Evil. Go back and watch those, if you need a reason (which you shouldn’t really). Even without digging into the extended universe, we can see that the community has been perfectly fine with adjusting to the added complexity regarding these issues, even after the initial release of Empire, moreso after Jedi.

Enter BioWare yet again, and Knights of the Old Republic. To avoid spoilers, I will simply say that you should definitely play through it. Lots of morality discussed and experienced therein, as well as a lot of detail given to the Sith and Jedi religious orders. The sequel, though not made by BioWare (not completely anyway), also have a lot to teach you about the moralities of Light and Dark side force users.

Which brings us to the upcoming Old Republic online game, which has even on our own forums sparked a bit of debate on morality. As BioWare has done a great job so far of dealing with personal and cultural morals in a mature and organic way, I hope they continue to do so when writing the stories for TOR. To put it simply, with all the detailed information we’ve been fed regarding morality and its effect on Force usage by both religious sects, I hope they don’t decide to simplify things in order to placate and attract a much larger audience (they hope). Simply put, not all Jedi are saints, and not all Sith are psycopathic murdering bastards.

I personally enjoyed playing through the branching morality paths, and some of them were tougher than you might think; though perhaps that’s my fault for taking them all too seriously. I play games for the story, and games that work morality into the stories add to the involvement and enjoyment (for myself). Anyway, that’s my take on it, so feel free to comment or discuss.

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Oh, it’s YOU. It’s been a LONG time. How have you been? I’ve been REALLY busy being dead. You know…after you MURDERED me? Okay, look, we both said a lot of things that you are going to regret. But I think we should put our differences behind us. For science. YOU MONSTER.