OMFG I''m gonna try this in English now. I''m developing a game engine whose purpose is to be fun and allow the exploration of ideas through gameplay, not scripts. One such idea is good and evil. I have many thoughts on the subject but as described and have studied the subject as well, but this game isn''t about *my* feelings, it is for the player to come to their own conclusions by playing through the scenarios which occur by way of the natural progression of the game(including interaction with characters of all sorts), not scripts. To set up this world, the game is a massive, free-form RPG. It takes place in a land which has quite recently been the destination for two huge new powers. Each power is a monstrous, gigantic castle the size of a state and whose sphere of influence extends to a 1/3 of the continent. One is good and one is evil. There is a third power, a large city, by which I introduce techonology and neutrality. I felt that since I''m exploring good and evil, it was okay to have a castle for each. Okay, let''s look at this from the viewpoint of the player who is actually doing what I designed for them(totally optional). They may ask certain questions. Questions which, when answered, will provide a framework for the in-game truth. This, however, kinda defeats the purpose, since it is the player''s sense which is most important and any allusion to an outside philosophy brings them out of their perceptions and into the game''s own. It''s Game Design 102: Immersion. These questions are: Why did the Castles come? Why are they there? Is it Armageddon, an on-going battle, what? Who runs the Good Castle? Is it truly good and run by entities who are indeed pure and good(out to do good)? Is it more like a Church(out to win)? Who runs the Evil Castle? Is it truly evil and run by entities who are indeed evil and wicked and live for torment and pain? Is their goal to dominate or destroy? Notice I say who *runs* the castles, who leads the castles. The castles are big enough to hold characters and whole races really that hold beliefs of varying degrees. So, then, how do I hide the truth? What explanation do I have for the castles existance and placement besides "I don''t know" which does not itself become a thesis? For instance, with all these opinions by those who man the casltes, one could say it takes a collection of ethereal beings to create and deliver a castle to a world. To me, however, this precludes the idea of there being an overall intelligence being responsible. How can an ''evil'' society survive(like those living in the evil castle or those who have been transformed by its presence)? To go back to goals, if upon arrival, the evil castle goes about slaughtering the innocent, we can safely assume it is evil. What if they don''t? What if they merely want to rule the land as opposing to allowing the good castle to have influence? What if all they want is to not allow any holy beings to survive(mortals are okay)? What is evil''s Ultimate Purpose, to torment and kill or to tempt and corrupt? Current solution, which doesn''t cover everything, is to switch around randomly the characters'' beliefs who are in a position to answer such things(no two games would have quite the same cast in the quite the same positions).

I''ve been holding onto a simular idea for years now...biggest difference is that the actual game mechanics play a major role in the development of the scenerio, that and I know deep down that being totaly unobiased is impossible in how both good and evil is presented...

All the same, at the end of the day we all pretty much think at some level that we are doing the right things anyway...even if our actions are deemed wrong (illegal or otherwise) we as humans almost always believe we are doing them for the right reasons.

I''ve read carefully your post and the previous ones, and frankly, I failed to understand what you really want.

So here is 0.02€ on the "good and evil" topic. First good and evil are pure creations of human beings : they are concepts tightly related to culture and society. Proof is that a lot of things were considered "evil" at a given time by a given society are now considered "normal" or "good". Also one may argue that evil goal should be to rule all the universe and good people will try to avoid that but it is naive : there are "good" things in domination and "evil" things in freedom.

Now if you want to stick with your game idea (which could be really great btw), you could replace "good vs evil" by a struggle for Life. On the one hand you would have those that want to protect Life in the universe and on the other hand those that want to utterly erase it. Note that this concept is close to Lucifer story, who hates humans. Also it doesn''t mean that the "evil" ones will have to slaughter everyone, it is just a long-term plan and every way yo achieve it is ok (including support to humans who work for them, though there are bound to be killed in the end).

Well, re-reading it, I''m not sure it will make sense but as I said before, I''m a little bit confused by your posts.

well there is grandia 2 (a console linear rpg game story orianted) were the story is about a reflexion about good and evil (each chapiter show a case of the problem) in manga there is shaman king (not the anime version whivh is bad)

well those are interesting because they are entertainement and show the range of the problematic around good and evil (from beleiver to fanatics to neutral, and variant betwen, like good which drive evil, culprit from the past etc...)
shaman king as a good vs good in his plot around the 13 chapiter of the manga which greatly more interesting than good vs evil...
where good are not compatible with another conception of good
it will be great enough to create a world where good and evil is scatter in some primitive element

for now there is two primitives for evil (active and passiv), the self centred without caring about other and being in things which is in contradiction of the sake and we can''t affect (event which is out of our influance, the lack of freedom)

the good is the opposite, caring about other and being in a good situation

but it''s not that simple good can lead to evil > a mother which protect too much is child give the child weakness which remain in evil by not being to act without is mother (not able to affect event by is own, and maybe can be self center because he thrust that his mother will protect him whatever happen)

eventually i have not mention the good and evil from benefit (the son is too protected by the mother but have benefit and are in his good)

the other matter is the principle
things are label evil or good when they violate value of the observer and lead to the concept of law(s), something good in one maybe not in another one, and lead to new conception of good and evil like tolerence and intolerance, lawful or chaotic

then you have a vector of bias which have
>>>>>>
benefit or not for the subject (benefit/loss)
wether we can affect or not source of benefit or loss(freedom/slavery)
behaviour towards other (selfish/generosity)
behaviour towar stranger (tolerance/rejection)
behaviour toward law (lawful/chaotic

it would be hard to be in complete darkness?
an intolerant selfish slave (certainly of some ideal) which take only loss from event where he has no control on and then reject law for chaos (common enemy in video games )


another theory is that god tolerate evil because it''s a test which is the condition of the freedom,



>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
be good
be evil
but do it WELL
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

See, your problem is that you have no metaphysical foundation for your "good" and "evil". A big castle that has "evil" engraved on the gate doesn''t do a damn thing for structuring a world, and unless you''re going to have a guy pop out of a the castle and give you a cheeseburger every time you stomp a kitten or betray an ally, the castle won''t be able to enforce a particular ethic.

What you need is either A) a system of punishment and reward that will enforce the systems, B) a cosmic order that somehow prefers good to evil, or C) a really entertaining combat engine that draws attention away from your crappy morality system.

Reading your post for the umpteenth time, I think your biggest problem is your insistence on using the words "good" and "evil" to describe two magic castles that may or may not possess those traits. You want to have your cake and eat it too. I''ll explain.

Have your cake: Institute a system of good and evil in which the classic bi-polar struggle takes place, and a third, neutral society is arising with a neutral conscience and an attempt at self-sustenance through technology. People are trying to escape the power of the absolute good and evil that surround them and find a way to express themselves and determine their destinies in a existentialist and rational way. For this to work, the two castles must perfectly represent a very real struggle for dominance between two true and eternal cosmic forces.

Eat your cake: You want to cast doubt on the purity of good and evil, so that the denizens of the Good Castle might not all be perfectly good, and might indeed be susceptible to doubt and vice. Your example of the church being out to win the fight is a good one. Rather than subjugating themselves to their representative universal order, they are scheming and conniving to do battle with their foes. This requires that the two absolute powers be fictional, created by their respective acolytes to exert power and authority over the masses. Here, "good" and "evil" are misnomers, and though the denizens of the castles might descibe themselves thus, it will mislead players when you, the disigner, use them.

So for one objective to be filled, "good" and "evil" must be true and real, and for the other objective to be realized, "good" and "evil" must be false and ethereal.

As I see it, you are suffering from a common delusion: The belief that God can be resisted. If God exists, then free will goes out the window and even the most fervent of opinions and desires amounts to no more than a mild amusement or disappointment to Him. If He doesn''t, then religion is no more than Karl Marx thought it was, and we''re most likely better off without it. It''s tough to find a middle ground when the only two postulates available are "God exists" and "God doesn''t exist". Of course the issue is far more complex than that, but it always leads to fights, and I don''t want to clutter up this thread, especially since it''s your second try at getting good responses.

So my advice is to choose how your world will be right at the outset. You can include features that might start to convince the player otherwise, but the world must have a constant structure. If you go with the Eat Your Cake scenario, I advise against using "Good" and "Evil" to name your castles. Instead, call them something that people would have come up with. The Order of Light vs. The Hand of Power or something. Good and evil are a little too loaded connotatively, and might gum up your players'' perception of the game, just as those two terms have gummed up our interpretations of your threads.

Besides, no organization would advertise their evilness. They wouldn''t even think of themselves as evil. Even an evil organization (Nazi Germany, Napoleon, Imperialist America) sees itself as good, perhaps the only good in the world. So unless you are going to make "evil" have no purpose other than screwing "good", good''s followers, and anything else, including its own followers, that get too close, I think you should reconsider.

And another thing, if you assign all the "order" actions to the idea of "good", then "evil" is boned. I''m a dark acolyte, and Jimmy over there is a wounded Hell Knight, and we''re facing a cleric/paladin duo. If I run over to Jimmy and give him a quick heal and then give him a bigger sword, I''ve demonstrated compassion and generosity, and the "good" guys have already won.

On the other hand, the good guys are all obliged to be all generous and good, so if half a dozen wounded Hell knights stumble into a church and ask for shelter, the priest would get negative mojo for turning them away. So he heals them and hides them and protects them, then they kill him and use his church as a stronghold behind enemy lines. Nothing out of character has happened. The bad guys deceived and killed for their side, and the good guy healed and nurtured for his.

Great points Iron Chief :D

What is the point of developing such a game anyway? What is it that you want the player to experience, what do you want them to get out of the game? What is the massage that you want to tell them?


The concept that I was going to try and explore in my game was that "At some point, the player finds they are doing the wrong things, what they think is the correct solution isn''t all it''s cracked up to be"....Gameplay wise I was planning on useing the players expectations and cliches of the RPG genre against them...to do this I was planning on implamenting a vampireish magic system in which MP were only earned for "drinking the blood of fallen NPCs", and once a spell is cast you could only recover MP by drinking more blood...the magic system would give the players lots of power quickly, but over time, if players don''t constantly replenish their MP then they will slowly die (get MP but get poisoned in the process, there is no antidote, players can only deley the inevitable by gaining more MP) In this way the get the power they expect, but it costs them the game...not only because haveing such power ultimately results in their death, but because it shifts their playtime focus from other more usefull actions that further the game along to "constantly feeding their MP addiction"....note, however that such a game design would more then likely alienate players rather then attract them...as such many players wouldn''t ever come to the same conclusion I was trying to explore, rather they would likely just think the game sucked, was unfair, and/or full of bugs...Altho some players may restart the game and go the more correct and difficult route by avoiding magic, all in all such a game wouldn''t be seen as an enjoyable, fun experience with such "golden poisened carrots" tempting the player all the time (and putting the player in situations where such temptations are extreamly difficult to resist)...In the end I realise that the best place for presenting a "message" or exploreing such deep issues is in a non-interactive way (film, book, etc...) as a game requires player input and such is more like an active debate of such issues/ideas rather then a onesided "designer approved" message being passed down.

I wrote a short story some years ago that touched on this subject the story was the battle between two powerful entities one who based on appears would be considered good and the other evil, but it become clear from there dialog during the fight that they are really diffrent sides of the same coin.

You could do something similar in your story don't make it clear or cut and dry which is which and make it a difficult judgement call.

For instance. Lets change them from good and evil to white and black.

you have a village black converts the people there its supporters, then whites army sweeps in and wipes out the villagers to prevent them from spreading black "corruption" to other nearby villagers.

so the question is which is good and which is evil?



-----------------------------------------------------
Writer, Programer, Cook, I'm a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document



[edited by - TechnoGoth on October 30, 2003 5:17:56 PM]

The "two sides of the same coin" idea is very good, and has been used effectively in the past. The drawback is that there''s always a lot of angst in those stories. I try not to kill a lot of people in Metal Gear Solid, and I stick to mission objectives in Grand Theft Auto without a lot of unnecessary carnage, but at no time in those games do I ever doubt my righteousness in doing what I''m doing.

What if halfway through Metal Gear Solid it is made clear to Solid Snake that he''s the bad guy and the "right" thing to do is pack it in and go home, or otherwise stop trying to interfere? That would be rough, and quite difficult to do in such a linear game.

If it was more like GTA, then perhaps you could pick and choose your missions, and thus avoid the crime, cars and money associated with them. Let Tommy Vercetti sign on with government agents trying to bring down the gang rather than trashing it from the inside with theft and muder, and this sort of dynamic might arise. I think it would be worthwhile to investigate the structure of such a game, and even try to come up with other, more complex options.

Unfortunately, if you''re using designer-made "missions", you''ll never get a truly free world. Making missions in real-time between multiple motivated factions has been the topic of more than one thread around here.

MSW, your idea of a "poisoned carrot" system reminded me of an idea I encountered around here some months ago. I might have come up with it, actually. It''s kind of a "Hulk" theory. The main character has the power to utilize incredible, superhuman powers, but those powers are either difficult to control or somehow costly to the character. In Bruce Banner''s case, his power results in a loss of control and a gradual erosion of his humanity.

It''s a cheesy idea, but if you could link it to something a little more practical, it could work. In Escape Velocity, you get a prototype cloaking device for your spaceship so you can deliver a team of commandos to a moon. It is powered by the same energy source that feeds your shields. You can use it, and at times you must, but when you turn it off you have only your hull to protect you.

I think that is the perfect way to execute a good/evil system. Instead of making an "evil" faction, make it a system of vice, virtue and temptation. We all want to weild the PUSD, but what if it was the EPUSD (Evil Platinum Uber-Sword of Doom)?? As you carry it, it absorbs your stats. Here''s an example.

Say your attack power (AP) is 60 unarmed, and 200 with a Fine Broadsword of Poking. You pick up the EPUSD, and it''s 500. Awesome. After a few days of carrying it, you swap back to the FBoP, and you''re at 150. Unarmed, 45 AP. The EPUSD has eaten 25% of your combat effectiveness! With the EPUSD, though, you''re still at 500. So you keep it. I''ll be damned if I''ll take the stat hit to use anything else... But it gets worse. After a couple of weeks, you''re powerless without the EPUSD. Even with a good sword, you can''t hit anything, and if someone lets you hit them, they laugh it off. You''re useless. To make matters worse, your EPUSD AP is 400 now. You''re still a powerful warrior, but how long will it last? In time, you have an EPUSD AP of 0, and are totally useless, with or without the magical sword. Maybe the next sucker to find it gets an AP of 560, since it''s got your power, too.

So the dilemma is clear: The sword is there, and it makes you practically invincible, but it gradually consumes you. There may be times when you can''t possibly surmount an obstacle without using the EPUSD, and so you have to take the hit and use it, but if you can''t get by most situations on your own, then you''ll find yourself using it more and more, until it gets you.

Other analogs of this situation are easy to imagine. Indeed, a newb with the full set of Evil gear would be tough as rocks, and could wreak havoc... for a time. Add to that magics that deplete you, or "russian roulette" systems, whereby a spell might kick the crap out of every bad guy around, or it might just eviscerate you.

I don''t know if any of these idea are really valid for RolandofGilead''s plan, but I figured I''d contribute them.

quote: In the end I realise that the best place for presenting a "message" or exploreing such deep issues is in a non-interactive way (film, book, etc...) as a game requires player input and such is more like an active debate of such issues/ideas rather then a onesided "designer approved" message being passed down.

quote: Original post by RolandofGilead
this game isn''t about *my* feelings, it is for the player to come to their own conclusions by playing through the scenarios which occur by way of the natural progression of the game(including interaction with characters of all sorts)

quote: Original post by TechnoGoth
You could do something similar in your story don''t make it clear or cut and dry which is which and make it a difficult judgement call.

For instance. Lets change them from good and evil to white and black.

you have a village black converts the people there its supporters, then whites army sweeps in and wipes out the villagers to prevent them from spreading black "corruption" to other nearby villagers.

so the question is which is good and which is evil?

Someone gets it.
Framing conflicts isn''t a problem. I can also keep the player exploring the for a long time, but all explorations cease one day.

Here is perhaps a thesis of my problem with assumptions:
Before a certain point in game time I have no basis for history or provable fact without some system in place. This would be bad as it would be the equivalent to ''invisible wall'' syndrome(where you make your character attempt to jump over an obstacle on a level boundary but instead of some logical barrier, you merely stop moving forward for no explicable reason-emphasis on *you stop moving forward*). However, with a metaphysical system in place it is inherently discoverable(if information exists, it can be found/copied). I do not want the player to discover any system, for once she does, she will say, "oh, that''s what it was about". The only thing a player should find out is what they think. So, if you can punch a hole in an assumption and explain the consequences or find a way around the problem, please respond.

Having an NPC respond "I don''t know." is not acceptable and is equivalent to the ''invisible wall'' mentioned earlier.