Moral Choices in Video Games

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Written by BuckGB on August 8th, 2009

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I've played both Fable II and Fallout 3, now I enjoyed them both and I thought they were both fantastic games but the moral choices in both really didn't play that big a role in the game. None of the choices I had to make were really that big or important. None of them effected me. I never had to stop and really think about it. Either way, whatever choice I made, it made no difference to me because I didn't really care. I was not emotionally invested in either the story or character.

Then I played a game called Mass Effect. Mass Effect was released before Fallout 3 and Fable II although I just got around to playing it recently. For the first time ever in a video game I became emotionally invested in the story. I actually cared what happened and the choices I was tasked with making were honestly very tough decisions.

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I was amazed that a story such as Mass Effect's could be so powerful. How was it that a game set in space, in the future, featuring aliens could have this effect on gamers? Space, future, aliens, these were things we as a gamer could not relate to, yet at the same time we felt the emotional pull of the story sucking us in. We were invested in it. The writing in Mass Effect was just that good. The elements in the story were foreign to us and the characters weren't real yet we still felt terrible when we had to choose to save Ashley over Kaidan or when we let the council die.

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