Choosing to be the good guy in video games
Fall is video game season. There’s a long list of games coming out in the next few months, many of which let you decide if you want to play as a good guy or a bad guy. Do right or do wrong?
The choices aren’t new. What is: a game that tracks and publishes the choices players make.
“The Walking Dead” is a series of games set in a post-apocalyptic zombie world.
“In one choice you could decide in a dialogue whether to tell the truth or lie, in another choice you decide who gets food and who doesn’t get food, and in the kind of the ultimate choice you decide which characters to help in a life threatening situation and who’ll live and who’ll die,” said Dan Connors is the CEO of Telltale Games, which makes “The Walking Dead.” He said it turns out most players want to do right.
“In the game we have a young girl character named Clementine and she’s kind of the conscious of the gamer and very few gamers want to do anything to put her into harm’s way or to threaten her.”
Connors said they’ll make these decisions even if they aren’t necessarily in their best interest. They’re less vindictive and less violent then they could be. “In one example, at the end of the episode there’s a group of people that you met that you thought you’d be safe with, but actually had plans to turn you into dinner because they had resorted to cannibalism, you had the opportunity to kill them. And most players wouldn’t take that jump to actually take these player-characters lives.”
So, why? Why would gamers choose to do the moral thing, when they could choose to do anything without real life trouble?
“I think we tend to use video games to play out roles or fulfill needs that need to be met that aren’t being met in our real lives,” said Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Texas A&M. “So most people have jobs, where on any given day, they don’t get to be the hero. They don’t get to do something life changing or world shattering. Video games are a way to get out the needs to be the hero, be the good guy, help out other people.”
Video games allow us to try out different ways of being. They can test out our morality.
“To use a little psychology lingo, it’s really a chance for us to self actualize to some degree,” said Ferguson. “To be the person we want to be rather than the actual self that has to go through our daily lives.”
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Many of this fall’s video games are big-budget, blast-’em games. But there’s a crop of indies out there too, some paid for by the crowd funding site Kickstarter.
“In a number of industries the creative economies don’t work out all that well for creators,” said Yancey Strickler, Kickstarter’s co-founder. “Generally to get any sort of work funded you’re having to give up some ownership of it, probably some creative control, and you are having to fit an idea of a market rather than say, your own vision.”
He said this year, people have pledged more dollars to games then any other category — $50 million to be precise. And the money isn’t just going to video games. Turns out a big piece of it is for new board and card games.
“Board games we think of as something we dust off when we go to the beach or something and play Trivial Pursuit for four hours,” he said. “But it’s a really, really alive category with a really big community.”
Apparently we’re all looking for something new to play.
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