Click to enlargeI’ve been playing the new game Dragon Age: Origins over the weekend and I had to talk about it. Beyond being a fun game, it has changed the status-quo of moral choices in video games. For those who don’t know, moral choices in games usually boil down to a super-evil choice or a super-good choice, exemplified in the above Penny-Arcade comic. In Dragon Age, the choices are vaguer, grayer if you will. For example, there’s a choice where a child is possessed and there are two ways to save him: kill the child or sacrifice his mother to enter the child’s psyche and destroy the demon possessing him. There is no specific good or evil choice in that situation. Someone will die either way and you have to choose who it is. Later in the game, I had to choose who I would put forward to be the next ruler of the game’s country. My two choices were the previous queen, Anora, the daughter of one of your enemies and someone you have only briefly met at that point in the game, or one of your teammates, Allistair, who you have been fighting alongside since the beginning of the game, the bastard-child of the second-to-last king but a man who does not want to be King. You have to choose between someone with experience you can’t necessarily trust or someone you trust who has no experience nor desire to rule.
Choices would have no impact if they did not have a consequence. In the first example, I chose to sacrifice the mother and had to explain to the father what happened to his wife and listen to the child wonder what happened to his mother and despair over the knowledge that he will not know for a while. In the case of the ruler-situation, I had chosen to spare Anora’s father, Loghain, which caused Allistair to accept the throne so that he could order the execution of Loghain for crimes he committed earlier in the game. I resisted that decision and ended up supporting the Anora to prevent Loghain’s death. Allistair decided that he would leave then, and Anora stated her intent to have Allistair killed so he could not start a rebellion to claim the throne with his royal blood. I did not want him to die so I called in the favor that Anora owed me to save him. This game has had decisions to make that I have had to stop and seriously consider and then feel guilt over the hurt feelings of my computer.
With all of this consideration on guilt I was curious if there were any known physiological causes or activators for guilt. On the Wikipedia Article for guilt, I found that “Guilt is founded on our empathy system and mirror neurons.” To paraphrase the article, mirror neurons are parts of our brain put us in other’s shoes, especially when what the other person does is caused or started by a decision or action that we have made or done. It is a high mark for the quality of the voice acting and character animation in Dragon Age to make me consider the feelings of a decidedly fake being.
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