Clint Hocking recently wrote a great post on the problem of didacticism in game design; I enjoyed both the post itself and a number of the subsequent responses (even got one of my own in there). One commenter brought up the issue of non-essential NPCs in Clint’s Far Cry 2, and their (the player’s) own emotional and moral hesitation at the possibility of killing those NPCs. I was rather satisfied with my response to that comment: it was something I’d been meaning to discuss for a while anyway, and so I reproduce it here (with slight modifications).

Just to play devil’s advocate: I could argue that precisely *because* many of the kill opportunities in FC2 are “not necessary to the mission or story,” they become meaningless and bereft of moralising impact.

I keep coming back to Randy Smith’s MIGS talk, primarily because it perfectly articulated so many ideas that have been nagging me for ages. He spoke of the conflict of interest between Player Goals and Character Goals: what might be a morally devastating decision for a game character is actually a completely trivial gameplay decision for the player—e.g., “Do I murder my wife or my best friend? Well, my best friend gives a perma-buff to health and mana, doubles my inventory slots, and packs a rocket launcher; my wife provides nothing and only carries a wildly inaccurate pistol. And so goodnight, my dearest, and God bless.”

I don’t think a game player is ever *not* aware that they’re playing a game, that they’re trying to *beat* a game, and that all the elements *within* the game are simply there to either hinder or advance that game. For players like that—like me, I guess—”useless” NPCs are then reduced to simple art assets somewhere on the game disc, that do nothing to advance or detract from the story, or the mission. And this is regardless of the detail of their physical 3D model, or how deep their background story/dialogue tree may be. I shot most of the useless NPCs without hesitation because I was bored and wanted to see the ragdoll engine at work. That, and—judging by a few instances—anyone I left behind had the potential to pull a gun out of nowhere and shoot me in the back. I was better safe than sorry, and so murder was a matter of no consequence.

I don’t mean to sound snippy of course, or to imply that I didn’t enjoy FC2 thoroughly. It’s just that I felt the supposed “morality” of dealing with “useless” NPCs wasn’t really reflected in the gameplay in any way.

What *did* deeply affect me was the first time I lost a partner. I did everything within my power *inside the game’s rules* to undo that loss: repeated re-tries, attempts at Rambo-style wild destruction, attempts at more defensive play, attempts at playing bodyguard. Nothing worked, and in the end the final gunshot of the mercy-kill felt like a huge “Fuck you” from the game world, and a huge failure on my part. There was serious Achilles-mourning-Patroclus rage after that one. Not because I was projecting humanity on an arbitrarily-designed art asset, but because the game itself had conspired to rob me of a highly beneficial resource in which I’d invested quite a bit of time.

Which leads me to…

THEOREM
If an art asset is useless to the player, only a select few will feel emotionally invested or morally affected by it. If it is intrinsically linked to the player’s goals, its behaviour and treatment will be more deeply affecting.¹

Obviously, the examples I gave above were somewhat extreme, and anyone justifying actions like that in real life would—rightfully so—be deemed psychopathic. But games are meant to be played, and while I’ll never say a videogame can’t be emotionally- or morally-affecting, I don’t think this has or can or will be done by having clichéd and tired old tropes being enacted on characters or objects of no consequence to the player.