The banality of moral choices in games, boiling down to “Choose between being an Angel or Satan” has been criticized ad nauseum. But even with properly ambiguous gray areas, moral dilemmas don’t fully work in games because at their core they are just, well… games.
I realized this on my current play-through of Fallout: New Vegas, when a certain very evil person does a certain very evil thing to the citizens of an entire town, giving you a chance to punish him. For my pro-goodness character, the choice was clear and yet… I hesitated. Not because I had moral qualms, but because I was concerned this may anger the other faction enough to bar me from their cities, thus depriving me of the game’s full content. Even despite spending two whole days locked in my room, fully immersed in the Mojave desert, my “gamer instinct” kicked in.
In itself, “selective content” like this is actually a Good Thing™ – your choices have real, significant repercussions, and create massive replay value. The Witcher 2 is a fantastic example, where the central hub in Chapter 2 (with all its quests) changes based on which faction you align yourself with. But even so, making choices to pick which content you want to see is not a moral choice, but a pragmatic one.
I do not deny there are those who can fully immerse themselves in the game world and forget they are playing a game. But that is not an easy or even voluntary feat. It’s not always possible to just “turn off” your gamer instinct, especially if you have been playing for years and got conditioned to recognizing certain mechanics. When I have a choice between “do something for free” or “demand payment,” I instantly know I will get good karma/alignment for the first choice, and my mind automatically assesses how this will reflect on my character and future prosepcts.
Unlearning those kind of habits is not impossible, of course, but certainly challenging when, each year, Bioware releases yet another RPG further reaffirming that the only way to deal with Suzy’s cat stuck on a tree is to either drop urgent world-saving efforts and start climbing, or set it on fire in front of her eyes.