Continuing: Even so, karma meters are not a universal feature–the Dragon Age series created by Bioware, for instance, dispenses with this mechanic, and they’re absolutely plagued with problems as a result. Granted, they have the room to create a world where things are more open to interpretation, but they have all the technical problems I mentioned AND the fans STILL complain that the game doesn’t notice or react to nearly enough things in nearly enough contexts. So, that’s the general background on why these karma meter things even exist. The next issue is that some (actually, MANY) people don’t much like the content of those meters. They don’t like which actions are deemed “good” and which “evil”. This is an issue that actually precedes computer games and dates back to the early days of tabletop roleplaying and the Dungeons and Dragons “alignment” system, which actually was created for much the same reasons that the karma meters were created in computer games–it is useful shorthand in a system where the player’s actions should have some kind of impact. This very issue has been discussed and debated ad infinitum ad nauseum in the gaming community for as long as I’ve been alive and no very useful progress has been made, because, ultimately, it is IMPOSSIBLE to create a shorthand, symbolic simplification of an enormously complex issue without losing a ton of information in the process. Heck, trying to represent hand-to-hand combat as a group of numbers and die rolls simple enough for a human to remember is the same kind of problem, and it’s why the “rules” for tabletop role-playing games can run to the thousands or tens of thousands of pages and be far from “complete”.

Aaaand some more:

Or, you can do the much more difficult method of having specific actions result in specific long-term consequences. (This entire system is designed around the problem of long-term consequences, immediate consequences can be portrayed directly–you beat someone up, they scream a lot, beg you to stop, etc.) There’s a lot to recommend this method–the sky’s the limit creativity-wise and you don’t have to worry about pinning quasi-arbitrary labels on things. However, you can’t escape the technical problems, either.

If you want a rational morality in your game, though, there is still an issue you seriously need to think about, and that’s this: People play games to have fun, and thus, as a game designer, it’s a major faux pas to put ANYTHING in the game that is, in general, Not Fun. This is where non-rational moralities actually have a HUGE advantage over rational ones: in realistic terms, if you make irrational, evil choices, for the most part, bad, *unenjoyable* stuff *should* result. People won’t trust you, so they won’t give you quests or sell to you or even talk to you. Your valuables should get destroyed, you get thrown in jail, your stats get fubared, your wife leaves you, your dog bites you and runs away, etc. etc. etc. If you make a game that works this way, you don’t actually have a game with two (or several) optional choice paths. You have a game with an “optimal” choice path, and one (or several) that leads inevitably to various flavors of disaster.