You know Yahtzee? That Brooker-esque games reviewer we all claim to watch purely for entertainment and never for buying advice? Well he’s recently repeated his not wholly incorrect assertion that morality choices in gaming are meaningless because they involve such extremes: ‘save Western Civilsation or eat a toddler’, and it got me thinking about a very recent gaming experience.You see, I’ve lost my dog. I first found him in scrapyard in the Capital Wastelands, and my initial thoughts were grim, Another irritating noisemaker to hoover up medicine and supplies, just like Sheva in Resi 5 or Rufferto (my dog in Fable II). I know, I’ve just compared an AI woman to a dog, but her effect on inventory management is the same.
My mood didn’t initially improve, as my newfound companion did his best to prove me right, soaking up enemy bullets like a meatsponge and consuming precious medicine, whilst throwing himself headlong into battle with everything from Supermutants to Mirelurks, forcing me to abandoned my careful ranged approach and dive in to rescue him.
Bit by bit, however, I began to warm to him. It might have been when he dived into a room full of Radroaches and killed them for me, saving me the trouble of switching from combat shotgun to lead pipe and providing me with some irradiated bug meat in the process, or it might have been when I turned around in the wasteland and found that he’d saved me from an attack by one of his canine contemporaries. Whenever it happened, I grew to enjoy Dogmeat’s company, and consequently was keen to keep him out trouble, ordering him to stay on the outskirts of battle. Which is how I found myself shooting solo through a pack of raiders, who led to another pack of raiders, and a house, and a settlement, and a sidequest, and job, and a cave system, and another settlement, with another side mission…wait, where did I leave my dog?
What’s this got to do with morality choices? (Remember I was talking about them up there? You googled for Yahtzee and got my first paragraph instead?) Only that you can’t expect game designers to do everything, or to know what will push your buttons. I’m feeling so guilty about Dogmeat that much as I want to resist the urge and keep playing through Fallout, I know I’m instead going to spend hours scouring the wasteland looking for him.
In Fable II, despite being a paragon of virtue, I was perfectly happy to off innocent Spire guards for the boss or allow young maidens to be aged by shadowy gods, because I had an important job to do. I had no qualms about harvesting Little Sisters in Bioshock’s Rapture - no matter what Libertarians might tell you, their philosophy of unbridled self-interest regardless of the consequences is inherently corrosive, so the Sisters were hardly going to end up having an idyllic lifestyle if I left them alone. No matter what morality choices are engineered for me in the game, I still tend to put the game first and suffer no real guilt because of it. But lose one imaginary irradiated mongrel, and boy, do I get pangs. Such pangs that I have to abandon my planned defence of oft-criticised reviewers' snowclones in order to tell you about my lost dog. Moop.
