Moral decision making is not one of those things people tend to associate with video games. Shooting, racing, twenty-minute unskippable summoning sequences: those are things that immediately pop to mind, but not soul-searching ethical quandaries. And, for many years, that was entirely understandable – Eating the ghosts in Pac-Man had no visible ramifications, and as far as the player knew, none of the spaceships they shot down in Space Invaders had any family to worry about.

Most early games were about fun, simulation, or escapism. They were also, more importantly, incredibly linear in general. Linearity, by its definition, does not offer much in the way of choice, and choice is ultimately the engine that allows moral decisions to make themselves known in games. Choice is what starts to allow a player to break out of the lines and start to delve into questions of Good and Evil and everything in between. Pen and paper RPG systems such as Dungeons & Dragons had their built-in systems of alignment, and these were easier to play out when a human being was running the show as dungeon master. If the players chose to follow a path different than what the DM planned, he could simply adapt. Video games, it was felt, either couldn’t, or shouldn’t, have to worry about player choice.

Can you imagine if Atari had to list all the names its been formally known as?

The oldest game I know of that started to touch upon the most basic of moral choices is Dragonstomper for the Atari 2600. Dragonstomper is a sort of more advanced version of Adventure, the seminal Atari classic. In Dragonstomper you play the nameless knight out to seize the nameless magic amulet from the nameless dragon to save the nameless kingdom. Where Dragonstomper took a big step away from its contemporaries was what was almost a footnote in the manual; a single line that mentioned that it wasn’t necessary to kill the dragon to win the game, and that, in fact, the dragon itself wasn’t evil, but had in fact been twisted by the amulet and could be rehabilitated if left alive.

Now, the actual implementation of this choice was that if you found a certain magic scroll, you could simply go around the dragon rather than defeat him. There were no scenes of freeing him from the amulet’s control, no scenes of a now-joyous dragon playing with children in the village square. Not exactly a stunning difference, but the fact remains that the game was making the first initial efforts to put questions into the player’s mind about the rightness or wrongness of their actions.

The triplets knew building a gate on the lawn was a daring landscaping choice, but that’s just the way they were.

Beyond Dragonstomper, there wasn’t much in the videogame world at the time about morality. That trend came to an abrupt halt in 1985 with the release of Ultima IV for the Apple II. Ultima IV was, as you might guess, the fourth installment of the Ultima RPG series. The first three Ultimas were popular, if not somewhat standard, computer RPG fare: Hero saves kingdom from big bad evil, everyone goes home happy. With Ultima IV, however, series creator Richard Garriot decided to try something completely different.

Ultima IV picks up in the years following the first trilogy, wherein the shattered lands of Sosaria have been rebuilt and unified as the kingdom of Britannia. Lord British, ruler of the land, sees that a new danger threatens his lands, and he needs to do something about it. The danger this time, though, is not in the form of a dragon or an evil wizard or even an oversized sentient vegetable, but instead takes the form of a crisis of the soul. The people of Britannia are demoralized, drained, and following paths to their own destruction. Theft, violence, cruelty; these things are becoming all too commonplace. To combat this, Lord British decides the kingdom needs someone to look up to, someone who embodies all that can be good in humanity. To that end, he declares a quest be undertaken by a brave, noble soul; a quest to become the Avatar of Virtue. As you might guess, this is where you come in.

The player, in their quest to become the Avatar, must travel the land gathering artifacts, battling monsters, and undertaking meditation upon the meaning of the 8 virtues. Obviously, it’s that last bit that set Ultima IV apart from its contemporaries. Everything your character did was judged on its adherence with the 8 Virtues of Britannia. Some of these things were pretty obvious; steal from a merchant and you lose some of your Honesty; give alms to the poor and you gain a little Sacrifice. Others were more subtle – flee from battle before your comrades, and it would cost you some Valor, but if you slaughter enemies needlessly, it could also hurt your Justice.

Also, the foundation of their basement was ill-placed in sandy soil. Should’ve hired a better contractor.

Ultimately, the aspect of choice in the game was a little deceptive; you couldn’t win without becoming the Avatar, and you couldn’t be the Avatar if didn’t follow the virtues. What was so important here, though, was that this was the first game to really delve into the concept that a player’s actions could have ethical consequence, and that multiple paths to achieving the same ends could truly be played out inside a game world.

Richard Garriot would continue to expand upon the idea of the virtues in subsequent Ultima games, with each iteration adding a little more refinement to the system. Sadly, the series drifted away from this concept rather sharply with the final two installments, something that upset a great many of its fans.

Beyond the Ultima series, there weren’t many games that dealt with moral choice in any significant way. This held true for many years until the late 90’s with the release of Fallout.

Fallout, produced by Black Isle Studios, took place in a post-nuclear apocalypse America, in a distant, 1950’s-esque future. The story begins in a Vault, a high-tech shelter built before the war where survivors hid with their families, allowing them to survive in safety during the many years since. Vault 13, which the main character has always called home, unfortunately has a problem: the water chip that provides the citizens with fresh, clean water has broken, and only a 150 day supply of water remains. The Overseer (ruler of the Vault), tasks you, the player, with venturing out into the wastelands for the first time in decades to try and find a replacement.

From the point you leave the Vault, the wasteland is your oyster. You can treat it gentle and perhaps cultivate a beautiful pearl from it, or you can rip it open, cook it up, and eat it for breakfast. Fallout gave your character, in addition to the standard RPG slate of attributes such as strength and intelligence, a more mysterious attribute called “karma.” Karma, as the name implied, was a changing score based on your character’s actions: do good things, and it would go up. Do bad things, and it would go down.

ProTip: Bazookas are always a correct moral decision

Where this system truly shined was that the player was presented with so many opportunities to choose their own path, and thus affect their karma score in appropriate fashion. Say, for example, that a town was being harassed by raiders. Now, you could just hike over to the raider camp and kill them all. Or you could hike over to the raider camp, join up with them, and come back and wipe out the town. OR you could hike to the raider camp, negotiate with them, find out that they have water to spare but no food, and the town had food but no water, and arrange a profitable trade agreement between the two parties. Oh, you could also just kill everyone involved and take all their stuff.

Depending on your karma, characters in the world would react differently to you. High karma would put you in good graces with the nice folk, bad karma will get you in with the “wrong” crowd. Furthermore, the different ways you handled situations would usually come up in the fantastic ending sequence which covered the full aftermath of your actions and your effect on the wasteland.  Arranging the trade between the earlier mentioned town and the raiders would probably result in the town flourishing; killing off the raiders, though it may have seemed like the right thing at the time, might result in the town never finding a water supply and ultimately dispersing into the wastes.  This was another key point of the game: the “good” decision isn’t always the right one, and even goody-two-shoes may face unexpected consequences.

Now, granted, the game didn’t allow you to do absolutely everything you wanted, but it did give you huge sway to make your own path through the world while taking into account the results of your choices. This was one of the first games to implement such a system smoothly and enjoyably, and it opened the door for many games afterward to try their own hand at it.

In the second half of this series, we’ll look at more recent games that have tackled morality and choice, and how well (or poorly) they did it…