Editors’ note: I’d like to see more real consequences in games. If I’m a royal dick, I’d like to see the townspeople shun me or the merchants to decline to sell to me. So would Jazz. What about you? -Jason
We’ve all heard the arguments that playing video games compels us to misbehave, and we all know that’s complete B.S. If someone’s going to steal, chances are they were going to steal whether they did it in a game or not. But I wonder if some games could do more to urge us against violent actions.
I wrote this because my mother and I had to go out and pick up my brother who, with his friends, had been detained by the police and entered into their databases for attempted burglary. I guess that’s influencing my writing.
How do we use games as a teaching tool against rash actions? Well, the first genre that I would look to would be open-world games where you get to choose to be good or evil (Fable, Fallout 3). Now, I wouldn’t prevent people playing through as evil, because that’s part of the fun of these games, but I would make evil much more realistic.
Maybe if you try to kill an innocent man in a town and fail, you would spend the game-time equivalent of a week in jail.
Because of that week in jail, maybe you would miss out on a time-specific sidequest that would now be unavailable. The town members would always remember what you did; they would even make sure that someone follows you around whenever you’re in town. Word of what you attempted would even spread to surrounding towns, and in other places merchants would refuse to sell to you.
There you go — the player would now understand that their character’s actions affect his life throughout the game, and the game hasn’t become one big boring cliché lesson.
However, this approach to in-game consequence has been tried before, and it failed horribly. I can’t remember where I heard this, so I can’t be sure of its accuracy, but word was that when Lionhead was developing Fable 2, they played around with a similar long-term effect system.
In the period that you’re a kid in that game, if bullies were to jump you and you severely lost the fight, then for the rest of the game, you could have a huge scar across your face. Everyone you meet would treat you differently because of that scar.
Thing was that during testing, testers became so angry that they were being affected from something early on that after losing an early fight, they would unplug the system before it had a chance to autosave!
The sad thing is that I can easily visualize this. Why would gamers react so rashly? Well, that’s obvious. People game for escapism, and knowing this, I must admit that I think my ideas might be a little far-fetched. However, I would just once like to see, maybe in a sim game, that when you don’t pay your rent, you get bad credit, and then you can’t get the best TV in the game.
So what do you guys think? Am I a visionary or just insane? Would you welcome consequence in game or fight against it?