Trying to Be Bad: A Gamer's Quandary

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Posted on 4/25/11 by Bryan Keithley · Comments

Donkey Kong jr A lot of games nowadays allow you to be good or evil. Champion or conqueror. Valorous or villainous. Savior... or sinner! All those great alliterative phrases. Only I can't really bring myself to be bad. Am I taking some sort of principled stand? Am I traveling the moral high ground? Or am I missing out on a good chunk of gaming goodness by being the party pooper? Is it good to be bad?

Back in the day, gamers didn't have such weighty questions to grapple with. There was Pong in the early 1970s. Two identical paddles. No good or evil going on there, just some sweet tennis sports. A little further on, you have something like Asteroids. Ship destroys a bunch of asteroids. Self-preservation versus inanimate flying rocks. Again, no real moral quagmire.

Then games added a little personality in the 1980s. Pac-Man chomping ghosts. No moral hazards there: ghosts are strange and evil! In Donkey Kong, you rescue a princess from a giant monkey. That's a good deed. I'll sleep just fine at night, thank you.

But Donkey Kong Jr. came out in 1982 as a sequel to Donkey Kong. The roles reversed. Now Mario was the villain, and Donkey Kong the poor and imprisoned victim! A real muddying of the moral waters, playing on the sympathies we established in the first game and causing us to doubt ourselves and our very place in the universe. It was awful, reader.

Despite the role reversal of Donkey Kong Jr., the goody-goody hero continued mostly unchallenged for a good decade. Then, the “evil” anti-hero came along in the mid 1990s. In Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, you play a vampire jonesing for blood. In Loaded, you play—and I have to quote the Wikipedia page, it's pretty classic—“villains, anti-heroes, psychopaths, perverts, mutants, and flamboyant murderers.” Despite the evilness, even in these games you eventually become redeemed (Kain) or you're fighting a greater evil (Loaded), so we're not into true evil yet.

A series of RPGs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, mostly from Bioware, really started the trend toward giving you the freedom to choose good or evil. In Baldur's Gate, you could assemble a squad of evil-aligned people, giving you evil street cred. In Planescape: Torment, you could do some low-down dirty things, and you could choose alternate endings based on how bad you wanted to be. Knights of the Old Republic (2003) took it to the next level, taking a nod from the classic “Jedi versus Sith” dynamic set up in the Star Wars universe, and throughout you could choose good or evil actions to influence many factors of gameplay, including the ending.

Us “good gamers” are now in an era—with Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Fallout 3, Fable, and many more—where we are being discriminated against because of our innate goodness. I am deprived of the full game experience because of my inability to partake in society-defying mayhem and the murder of dough-faced innocents. Oh, for the days of slaying evil dragons and bopping Bowser on the head. Things were so much simpler then.

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