I'm having trouble making a decision about a certain feature of my current project. First a little background. This is an single player RPG based in a near future world. Large pharmaceutical are a major influence in this world and supply the population with a variety of designer drugs. At this point I should mention that I want to take a "JUST SAY NO" view towards drugs within the game. The drugs in the can be used improve stats or add skills to the hero, the player can always decide to go without. Progression without drugs will initially be difficult but not impossible. later with continued abuse the drugs with show long term side effects, thus hindering your progress later in the game. Now this in itself does not present a problem to me and I think the drug element will add a lot to the gameplay and has a lot of story-telling potential. The rest of the game is a traditional RPG fare, with lots battles and violence.Therefore my dilemma is this, if I make a moral stand on drugs in the game then should I also take a moral stand towards violence. There will be not a lot game left, if I take out the battles... Any ideas?

Why the dilemma? As far as I'm aware drugs and violence are orthogonal, unless the drugs are hard to obtain, causing (possibly violent) crime in the search for money. From the sounds of your game these drugs are an accepted part of the culture (much the same way caffeine, paracetamol etc. are in our culture) in which case I'd say there's no moral conflict involved. Does your 'just say no' sentiment apply to pharmaceuticals and other performance-enhancing drugs, or only to purely recreational drugs?

Uhhh,

I don't want to sound immature or anything but it's a game, right? I understand that you might feel as if you have some moral responsibility to the players, and to these ends I can understand you taking the moral high ground with the drugs, but in the end it's a game. If you take all of the conflict [moral and physical] out of it, then it'll probably end up being boring and unplayable.

Looking at it from another angle, you're giving the player a choice with the drugs, why aren't you giving them a choice with the violence? If it's because it will make creation of the game significantly easier, ask yourself if you can spare that development time.

So long as the people you're fighting are bad [ie ideally you'd make it so that they initiate combat so that the player is defending themselves], I don't even see too much of a moral dilemma here.

Just my thoughts,
CJM

Video games are essentially like a good artistic book. There is a main character. There is the supporting characters. THen you have the plot, drama, romance, conflict, resolution and so forth. Some of the best books in history had some form of violence, drugs, etc etc. Every good story has somthing in that would normally shock the reader into saying " What he can't do that!" Moby Dick, Sherlock Holmes, etc etc. Point being, each generation of good literature had culturally objectional material into it. What is culturally objectionable now compared to then it a different story.

A good game will be like a good book. Leave the political and moral correctness to the politicians.

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Original post by Cian OConnor A good game will be like a good book. Leave the political and moral correctness to the politicians.

Exactly. :) You don't see people complaining about Treebeard feeding Merry and Pippin bowls of hobbit growth hormone, do you? :P

this is a bit long but...

i'm not going to question the direction your taking, i do believe your making some rather arbitrary assumptions, but this is how i would do it...

firtst though:
basic philosophy that you can't get an 'ought' from an 'is' so i don't think you can use rules alone to show the player the error of their ways, you must rely on their judgement and sense of good and evil

A) the penalties approach
by making drugs apply side effects, withdrawl symphtoms, and simulatingthe player building up a tolerance to the drugs you 'could' create a realistic situation where drugs made the game more difficult, or NPCs had an adverse reaction to the player.

example:
when taking a combat booster, the avatar could percieve more NPCs being more hostile than they realy are, borderline neutral becomes ready to attack, thus making the avatar more violent. while this misperception doesn't constitue 'evil' it does display a disreguard for others which the player must then decide to be good or evil. if the player built up a tolerance to this drug, then they would rerquire more and more to achieve the same effect, thus making more and more of the world look like opponents that were threatening them. as long as the side effect was (somewhat) random to each npc it would be difficult to judge whether another character was a threat or not. if withdrawl included penalties to the character's combat stats then the drug would be required to maintain basic functionality (addiction)

B) the inner strength approach
alternatively you could approach it by saying taking drugs was a quick and easy path. by giving diffrent rewards for doing things 'clean' you reward self-reliance with inner-strength and drug dependence with an increased ability to use these drugs.

example:
junkies will be much more capable of locating, and home brewing drugs; they will know more about the effects and be able to judge the right dosage for the right situation. clean persons can run faster, jump higher, and think inteligently all of the time, their power would be more constant because they didn't draw on external forces, drugs, to acomplish things

i'm beginning to ramble a lot here, but i like this disscussion i think its more interesting than "how do i get 60 fps on a geforce 3?"

You expressed a concern that fighting is a big part of the game. Here's a question for you: Are fighting abilities a big part of character development? If I'm going to be working day and night to max out my kung-fu, ninjutsu and rifle skills, I'll be pretty miffed if the game punishes me for using them.

If I'm going to be delivering packages and mopping floors through the whole game, then I want two things. First, I want to be able to get good at mopping and FedExing. Second, I want an end-game scenario that calls for these skills and rewards me for cultivating them.

If I deliver a thousand packages and mop a thousand acres of linoleum, and then find myself with a mop in one hand and a package in the other facing the ultra arch-demon of pain that can only be destroyed with level forty bazooka skills and must be destroyed before I can see the end cutscene, I'm going to come to your house and introduce you to some unorthodox uses for a mop.

If violence is the medium for your game, then don't be ashamed about it. Human excellence is admirable no matter what form it takes. If I put a lot of honest work into being the best smash&grab burglar I can be, and then I face the Fort Knox of Wal-Marts and come away with a plasma TV and nobody gets a picture of my face, I'll be proud. That's great. You don't have to be petting kittens and planting trees to feel like you're good at something.

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Original post by StaticVoid Progression without drugs will initially be difficult but not impossible. later with continued abuse the drugs with show long term side effects, thus hindering your progress later in the game.

Sidestepping the moral issues, I think this would make for a poor gameplay decision. I don't want to ruin the latter stages of the game with my early choices. The longer the duration between the choice being made and the punishment being given, the more irritation I am going to feel and the more time I will think I have wasted.

Quote:

A good game will be like a good book. Leave the political and moral correctness to the politicians.

Yes and No. Some of the best games around are the ones where you make moral based decisions that if you make the better judged decision it will aid you later on in the game. I believe Ultima 4 had an incident where you could choose to rob this blind lady and she wouldn't know it - until later on - in which case she would refuse to help you. If you gave her money she helped you, etc...

Anyways, I think Knights of the Old Republic 2 has some sort of thing like this - decisions you make in the game affect your light/dark side rating, changing the story as you move along. Black and White did it as well (in a very comical way), you get the point though.

(I've only read the first post, do, forgive me if this has been brought up before...)

Have you noticed in the various Disney films (Bambi, Hercules, The Incredibles), there is fighting/killing, but no blood?
People die, but their deaths are never actaully shown--killing, but no dying--you get what I'm saying?

You *could* go that route. For example, have an enemy get "KO'ed" instead of "Killed", or just have them fade away or dissapear instead of dying with blood squirting on the screen...