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Moss_Piglet comments on Open Thread, November 1 - 7, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have a game I've been fantasizing about and I think I could make it work. It has to be a game, not a story, because I want to pull a kind of trick on the player. It's not that unusual in fiction for a character to start out on the side of the "bad guys", have a realization that his side is the one that's bad, and then go on to save the day. (James Cameron's Avatar is a recent example.) I want to start the player out on the side of bad guys that appear good, as in Eliezer's short story "The Sword of Good", and then give the player the opportunity to fail to realize that he's on the wrong side. There would be two main story branches: a default one, and one that the player can only get to by going "off-script", as it were, and not going along with what it seems like you have to do to continue the story. (At the end of the default path, the player would be shown a montage of the times he had the chance to do the right thing, but chose not to.)
The actual story would be something like the anti-Avatar; a technological civilization is encroaching on a region inhabited by magic-using, nature-spirit-worshiping nomads. The nature spirits are EVIL (think: "nature, red in tooth and claw") and resort to more and more drastic measures to try to hold back the technological civilization, in which people's lives are actually much better.
Does this sound appealing?
I like the idea, mainly because I spent most of Avatar rooting for Quarditch (easily the biggest badass in the last decade of cinema), but it seems like there's another way to do it that might have a bit more power;
Why not have them both be "right," according to their own value systems anyway, and then have the end-game slideshow in both branches tell the player the story of what they did from the perspective of the other side?
In terms of workload, it seems minimal; from a story perspective you already need both sides to have sympathetic and unsavory elements anyway, while from a design perspective all you need to add is a second set of narration captions for the slideshow contingent on which side the player supported.
And in terms of appeal, it certainly seems more engaging than most AAA games. Spec Ops: the Line proved that players are masochists and that throwing guilt trips at them is a great way to get sales and good reviews, while Mass Effect 3's failure shows that genuine choice in endings is pretty important for a game built on moral choice.
This would ruin the point I'm trying to make.
You don't have to make both branches equivalent. Both of them could feel "right" from inside, but only one of them could contain an information which makes the other one wrong.
In one ending, the hero only has limited information, and based on that limited information, the hero thinks they made the right choice. Sure, some things went wrong, but the hero considers that a necessary evil.
On another ending, the hero has more information, and now it is obvious that this choice was right, and all the good feelings from the other branch are merely lack of information or reasoning.
This way, if you only saw the first ending, you would think it is the good one, but if you saw both of them, it would be obvious the second one is the good one.
I like this idea but it seems hard to differentiate between "You did what you thought was right but you need to be more careful about what you believe" and "you got the bad ending because you missed this little thing", which is something many games have done before.
An example is Iji where the game plays out significantly differently if you make a moral decision not to kill, but if you take the default path it doesn't let you know you could've chosen to be peaceful the whole time. It involves an active decision rather than a secret thing you can miss, but it also doesn't frame it as a "MORAL CHOICE TIME GO"