Incentivizing Morality
In the comments of my last post, Kring had this to say:
In an RPG I don’t think there should be a game mechanic rewarding “the correct way” to play it. The question isn’t why aren’t we all murder-hoboing through a game where you can be everything. The question is, if you can be anything, why would you choose to be a murder-hobo?
In the vast majority of games, “the good path” is incentivized by default. This usually manifests in terms of a game’s ending, which sees the hero and his/her scrappy teammates surviving and defeating the antagonist when enough altruistic flags are raised. Conversely, being selfish and/or evil typically results in a bad ending where the hero possibly dies, or becomes just as corrupt as the original antagonist, and most of the party members have abandoned you (or been killed). It’s almost a tautology that way – the good path is good, the bad path is bad.
Game designers usually layer on addition incentives for moral play though. The classical trope is when the hero saves the poor village and then refuses to accept the reward… only to be given a greater reward later (or sometimes immediately). I have often imagined a hypothetical game in which the good path is not only unrewarding, but actively punished. How betrayed do you think players would feel if doing good deeds resulted in the bad guy winning and all your efforts come to naught? It would probably be as unsatisfying in such a game as it is IRL.
Incentives are powerful things that guide player behavior. And sometimes these incentives can go awry.
Bioshock is an example of almost archetypal game morality. As you progress through the game, you are given the choice of rescuing Little Sisters or harvesting them to consume their power. While that may seem like an active tradeoff, the reality is that you end up getting goodies after rescuing three Little Sisters, putting you about on par with where you would have been had you harvested them. By the end of the game, the difference in total power (ADAM resource) is literally about 8%. Meanwhile, if you harvest even one (or 2?) Little Sister, you are locked into the bad ending.
An example of contrary incentives comes from Deus Ex: Human Revolution. In this one, you are given the freedom of choosing several different ways to overcome challenges. For example, you can run in guns blazing, sneak through ventilation shafts, and/or hack computers. The problem is the “and/or.” When you perform a non-lethal takedown, for example, you get some XP. You also get XP for straight-up killing enemies. But what if you kill someone you already rendered unconscious with a non-lethal takedown? Believe it or not, extra XP. Even worse, the hacking minigame allows you to earn XP and resources whereas acquiring the password to unlock the device gives nothing. The end result is that the player is incentivized to knock out enemies, then kill them, search everywhere for loot but ignore passwords/keys so you can hack things instead, and otherwise be the most schizophrenic spy ever.
Does DE:HR force you to play that way? Not directly. Indeed, it has a Pacifist achievement as a reward for sticking just to non-lethal takedowns. But forgoing the extra XP means you have less gameplay options for infiltrating enemy bases for a longer amount of time, which can result in you pigeonholing yourself into a less fun experience. How else could you discover the joy that is throwing vending machines around with your bare augmented hands without having a few spare upgrades?
Speaking of less fun experiences, consider Dishonored. This is another freeform stealth game where you are given special powers and let loose to accomplish your objective as you choose. However, if you so happen to choose lethal takedowns too many times, the environment becomes infested with more hostile vermin and you end up with the bad ending. I don’t necessarily have an issue with the enforced morality system, but limiting oneself to non-lethal takedowns means the majority of weapons (and some abilities) in the game are straight-up useless. This leads you to tackle missions in the exact same way every time, with no hope of getting any more interesting abilities, tools, or even situations.
I bring all this up to answer Kring’s original question: why choose to be the murder hobo in Starfield? Because that’s what the game designers incentivized, unintentionally or not. Bethesda crafted a gameplay loop that:
- Makes stealth functionally impossible
- Makes non-lethal attacks functionally impossible
- Radically inflates the cost of ammo
- Severely limits inventory space
- Gates basic character functions behind the leveling system
- Has Persuasion system ran by hidden dice rolls
- Feature no lasting consequences of note
Does this mean you have to steal neutral NPCs’ spaceships right from under them and pawn it lightyears away? Or pickpocket every named NPC you encounter? No, you don’t. Indeed, some people would suggest that playing that way is “optimizing the fun out of the game.”
But here’s the thing: you will end up feeling punished for most of the game, because of the designer-based incentives not aligning with your playstyle. In every combat encounter – which will be the primary source of all credits and XP in the game regardless of how you play1 – you will be acutely aware of how little ammo you have left, switching to guns that you don’t like and also take longer to kill enemies with, being stuck with smaller spaceships that perform worse in the frequent space battles, and don’t offer quality of life features you will enjoy having. Sinking points into the Persuasion system will make those infrequent opportunities more successful, but those very same points mean you have less combat or economic bonuses which, again, will leave you miserable in the rest of the game.
Can you play any way you want in Starfield in spite of that? Sure. Well… not as a pacifist. Or someone who sneaks past enemies. Or talks their way out of every combat encounter. But yes, you can avoid being a total murder hobo. You can also turn down the graphical settings to their lowest level and change the resolution to 800×600 to roleplay someone with vision problems. Totally possible.
My point is that gameplay incentives matter. Game designers don’t need to create strict moral imperatives – in fact, I would prefer they didn’t considering how Dishonored felt to play – but they should take care to avoid unnecessary friction. Imagine if Deus Ex: Human Revolution did not award extra XP for killing unconscious NPCs, and using found passwords automatically gave you all the bonus XP/resources that the hacking game offers. Would the game get worse or more prescriptive? No! If anything, it expands the roleplaying opportunities because you are no longer fighting the dissonance the system inadvertently (or sloppily) creates.
In Starfield’s case, I’m a murder hobo because the game doesn’t feel good to play any other way. But at the root of that feeling, there lies a stupidly simple solution:
- Let players craft ammo.
That’s it. Problem solved – I’d hang up my bloody hobo hat tomorrow.
Right now the outpost system is a completely pointless, tacked-on feature. If you could craft your own ammo though, suddenly everyone wants a good outpost setup, which means players are flying around and exploring planets to find these resources. Once players have secured a source of ammo, credits become less critical. This removes the incentives for looting every single gun from every single dead pirate, which means less time spent fighting the awful inventory and UI. With that, being a murder hobo is more of a lifestyle choice rather than a dissonance you have to constantly struggle against.
That’s a lot of words to essentially land on leveraging the Invisible Hand to guide player behavior. And I know that there will be those that argue that incentives are irrelevant or unnecessary, because players always have the choice to play a certain way even if it is “suboptimal.” But I would say to you: why play that game? Unless you are specifically a masochist, there are much better games to roleplay as the good guys in than Starfield. You can do it, and there are good guy choices to make, but even Bethesda’s other games are infinitely better. And that’s sad. Let’s hope that they (or mods, as always) turn it around.
- I have read some blogs that suggest you can utilize the outpost system to essentially farm resources, turn them into goods to vendor, which nets both credits and crafting XP. So, yeah, technically you don’t have to rely on combat encounters for credits. However, you can’t progress through the story this way, and I’m not sure that using outposts in this fashion is all that functionally different from simply stealing everything. ↩︎
Posted on October 5, 2023, in Commentary, Philosophy and tagged Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Incentives, Moral Choices, Murder Hobo, Optimization, Starfield. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
In An Age 
I was going to comment on the first post but then I thought “It’s way too complex a topic to address in a comment” so I restrained myself. That’s the same kind of self-control required to play the games in the “sub-optimal” but morally acceptable way the design all too often mitigates against. Then you posted on the same topic again and, like a gamer who’s discovered that keeping his gun in his pocket just doesn’t feel as good as getting it out and spraying it about, here I am.
Only you’ve pretty much parenthesized all the issues I was going to raise with alternate opinions, almost as though you’re debating with yourself. My two main arguments were going to be that a) These are mainly role-playing games of one stripe or another so it’s always in the hands of the player to play the role the way he, she or they prefer and b) that most of the poor design issues are most likely the result of sloppiness, haste, thoughtlessness, carelesness or financial constraints rather than any intent by the designers to direct the player along a particularly immoral path. The Deus Ex example looks like a particularly egregious example of someone just not being bothered to tie up some very obvious loose ends in the code. It’s the kind of thing that happens all the time in live service games until someone notices, labels it an “exploit” and fixes it.
Unfortunately for my comment, you cover all that in the body of the post. And you’re basically correct in that it doesn’t matter if it’s sloppiness or malice; rewarding players for “bad” behavior effectively penalizes them for being “good”. Personally, I’ve always put the problem down to the “game” part, not the “role playing” or the design. It’s framing these narratives as “games”, meaning they can be subject to both scoring and win/lose conditions, completely subverts all storytelling. The real solution is to take all the narrative out and just leave the game mechanics or else write a novel or a movie script. Or a purely scripted game of the kind we mostly refer to as a “visual novel”, which is much the same thing.
(If this has no paragraphs, I apologise. For some reason the comment field is refusing to allow line breaks.)
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Ha, yes, I was very much debating against myself the entire time I was writing this post. Even now, I still feel a bit weak to the counter-argument of “but you could just… not be a murder hobo.”
At the same time, I don’t feel it is fair to lay it all at the feet of the player. These are games with choices, and the designers are the ones who program and balance them. There may be people out there whom will never choose “evil” no matter how imbalanced the rewards are, and that’s fine. But unless the designers are intentionally trying to skew the storytelling a certain direction, would it not be better to have the choices be as similarly viable as possible?
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Well-argued. I’ll admit reading this series is causing me a bit of soul-searching of my own, because in most other contexts/genres optimisation is very much my jam, too. Guess RPGs turn me into a maudlin hippie.
“You can also turn down the graphical settings to their lowest level and change the resolution to 800×600 to roleplay someone with vision problems. Totally possible.”
Okay, but this snark cuts both ways. We’ll absolutely play an eye-annihilating pixel art game (or go to absurd lengths to get an old gem working) if everything else about it is good. Yet the minute we are called upon to work our ethical imagination a little without having systems to reinforce it… etc.
Should player power basically never be tied to ethical choices, then, and is it a strict developer error to do so? And doesn’t that miss out on ludonarrative synergy?
The game that comes to mind here is Vampyr, one of my favourite B-tiers, mostly for the vibe. It goes all in on this. By following the path of self-restraint you deprive yourself of a fair bit of xp, and if you’re consistent about it, it makes the gameplay about twice as hard as otherwise by the endgame. (Granted, the game’s just not that difficult in the first place.) It’s a bit of a pain, but it feels good, to me. The difference between this and DX:HR is that far from being schizo, it makes perfect narrative sense that not feeding as much and generally not acting extra-vampiric makes you weaker. Is that not worth the hassle?
“But I would say to you: why play that game?”
Yeah, QED. Starfield was already a tenuous proposition for me because I’d spend half the time unfairly wanting it to be NMS, and you’re definitely spitting some nails into the coffin.
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Should player power basically never be tied to ethical choices, then, and is it a strict developer error to do so? And doesn’t that miss out on ludonarrative synergy?
That’s a bit of a an armor-piercing question. Nicely done. I would say ludonarrative synergy is ever the ideal… but honestly I don’t always feel like its worth it.
I made a post a few years ago called Marshmallow Test that touches on this. In Dishonored, you are actively and almost immediately punished over the course of the game for killing people. On top of that, the devs continue to introduce new weapons, traps, abilities, and situations that you can only use to kill people. And then there is the final cudgel of the bad ending for killing people. So the best way to play the game is to… play the game as little as possible. Use the same few nonlethal tools in the same way for hours and hours, to be rewarded with a better cutscene at the end. Ludonarrative synergy achieved.
But at what cost?
I haven’t played Vampyr, so maybe they were able to pull it off there. But within my experience, games that dangle carrots in front of you and then beat you with the stick for eating them aren’t fun. Which is sad, because the devs obviously had the fun stuff right there, but decided that the “gotcha!” was more important to the life lesson or whatever they were trying to convey. As if most of us out in the real world aren’t constantly being Marshmallow Tested on the daily.
So to answer the original question, I would say this: if the devs can thread the needle of ludonarrative synergy while also having the “correct” path be equivalent fun (in different ways), sure, go for it. But I haven’t yet played a game where the devs were successful. Meanwhile, all the games I played with enjoyably deep, philosophical dilemmas didn’t also require you to be a masochist.
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