Social Sanction And Game Choice?

This year, we were all about choice and consequences. I looked at that issue from several angles and decided on a couple key facts from my perspective. First, to invest in-game choices and behaviors with emotional relevance and deeper meaning can be a deliberate decision on the player's part, and moreover one it's up to them to make -- as opposed to staring at the screen, expecting the game to make that connection for you. Second, part of the fun and freedom in having choices in games is to experiment with a different way of being -- simply being, even when those choices do not change the way the game feels, plays, or unfolds. You can do completely out-of-character things -- like killing Little Sisters -- to see what will happen, to experience the thrill of evil without consequences. One of the reasons I really like God of War II is the opportunity to be so masterfully brutal in a way that doesn't actually harm me or anyone else.

But I think we can place most of the credit (blame?) on BioShock for ushering in this era of considering choice and realism so thoughtfully. I'm pretty sure the audience is hugely divided on whether BioShock was meaningful, was a moral dilemma, offered real choice or not. The reason I feel so positively about BioShock is that I played it cruel, and chose to invest in finding out what that'd feel like. It was a closed-circuit experimental fantasy to me (and boy, did I get told).

But N'Gai Croal currently has some really interesting thoughts on how we can invest the behavior we do in games with actual, long-term, lingering consequences. He correctly asserts that one of the biggest deterrents to anti-social behavior and crime is not necessarily the fear of retribution, incarceration or other punishment, but rather the fear of how we will be judged by others. In other words, being branded as a criminal, with the associated consequences of social perception, is worse than actually having gone to jail.

So, he suggests, why not take advantage of this brave new world of networked gaming we're in? Why not take all those friends lists -- which Microsoft has just made completely expose-able on Xbox Live -- and let them tell the story of just what kind of gamer, what kind of person you are?

But what if developers attempted to bring social sanction into the experience? What if your Gamertag were designated "Child Killer" for having murdered the Little Sisters--or "Good Samaritan" for having saved them? Microsoft recently announced its plans to add the Facebook and MySpace-inspired feature of allowing you to browse your friends' Friends Lists; what if everyone on your Friends List were notified each time you killed a Little Sister--or every time you rescued one--like the Status Updates on Facebook? What if the game maintained a list of everyone you killed in the game, including their names, ages, pre-Adam pictures and a description of how you killed them, for all of your friends to peruse at their leisure? If your peer group were "watching" you, if the Xbox Live community or the entire Internet could keep tabs on your videogame morality, would it change how you played games?

It's definitely an idea with legs. After all, don't we already judge each other a bit by what the gamertag says? We're proud to get achievements -- but isn't a big part of that the fact that everyone else will now see we got those achievements? I have a friend who has little else to do but play XBLA all day long, and everytime I go to check out a new arcade game for myself, his infuriating little "face" pops up in my dashboard, displaying some high score he's achieved that I could probably never even approach.

Letting us carry the stigma on our gamer profiles for what we've done and how we've played is an intriguing idea, but I do have a caveat. When I play any game, whether that's BioShock or Mass Effect or whatever -- I do try to connect to the experience personally. But I draw a hard line between that character, that closed-ended story, and myself. Even with Mass Effect, which in my eyes allows you to personalize the protagonist to an unprecedented degree, I look at Lola Shepard as a character. I've created a concept of who she is and what she will do and how she will respond in certain situations, and it isn't necessarily who I am or what I would do, or representative of my real-world values (Lola Shepard is a ruthless renegade bitch). Why should I be held responsible for Lola? Just because I decided my character in BioShock was a mindless tool high on a deceptive sense of power, does that mean I, Leigh, ought to be paraded before my friends as a Child Killer?

Part of the fun, sometimes, in doing atrocious things in games is that it's fiction. The fact that it's fiction does not make it any less impactful to me. Another part of the fun for me, in video games, is that you can experiment with the boundaries of a world, push them, and if you leave a permanent mark, you can reset, try again. I'd hate if the fear of being caught in my private, solitary mess-around actually restrained me from playing around in a game. So to answer N'Gai's question -- yes, it would change how I played games, but I don't think for the better.

Still, I definitely think there is more we can do with networked gaming. This would be a great idea for multiplayer, open-world games; where over time your actions and their consequences could be aggregated to show to other players a picture of what kind of person your character is, what kind of player you are, which would then determine how -- or whether -- they approached you. To me, MMOs in general are emotionally and socially meaningless experiences (less because of the games themselves, but that's a topic for another time). Perhaps an idea like this could finally fix that.