The mid 1900s was the birth of video games. At first, the games were simple; early games like Pong, Brick Breaker, Pac-Man, and Galaga were nearly all the same game, with the shared simplistic goal to score the most points. As the games and technology evolved over time, the games became more complicated. Games like Pokemon, Metroid, and Legend of Zelda still all had relatively simple goals, but there were now stories and characters there that captured hundreds of thousands of people all over the globe. The game industry has done nothing but improve itself as the years have worn on, which brings us to today’s games. Nearly all games, professional or indie, have some form of another of player choice in them. Many of those games create a single, …show more content…
At first glance, this seems like a pretty good, moral goal; the world is infested by dangerous spectres and nasty monsters. In fact, the Batter calls the quest his “holy mission” several times. Since the player controls the Batter, despite the two being treated as completely different entities, anything the Batter does is also the player’s fault. Unlike many games that involve morality as a concept, the game offers no branching story paths, no different dialogue, no significant choices at all, until the very end. In the beginning, the player may truly believe that what the Batter is doing is not evil. In fact, the feedback is positive. The citizens thank the Batter, and by extension the player, for eradicating, or “purifying”, the spectres infesting the mines and the barns. It is here that the effect of “roles” come into play. According to Tsang, when an individual has a “role orientation”, they become “more obedient to authority”. In this case, the “role” in question is the person playing the game’s role as a player. The player tends to believe that they are playing the so-called good guy, until the Batter begins to start acting in a slowly more morally reprehensible way. It is at this point that the player begins to engage in “moral rationalization” in order to keep themselves from feeling guilty. Since the player controls the Batter’s actions, not choices, they cannot actually be held responsible for what the Batter has chosen to do. However, the Batter cannot attack without the player’s direction, and as such the player must go along with the Batter’s choice in order to continue playing the game, even if those choices cause them to feel guilty or unsettled. The only other option is to