I'm confused why you're addressing this question to Kadajko. I've been arguing this point much more strongly. lol.
Apologies, I had fun with Kadajko in another thread and that's probably why
I'm going to chicken out a bit on social contract theory because I have lots of problems with it (see Carol Pateman if you want to know why) and that will get us waaaay off topic.
But to your examples:
What I object to is with a moral system in a game, it's almost always broken. For example:
- You get good karma for doing an (stupid good) action like saving a murderer (who you know will murder again) and evil karma (normal good) for letting him die.
- You get good karma for saving a town for money (normal evil), and evil karma (stupid evil) for burning it down for no reason.
- You get good karma for eating your vegetables and bad karma for eating junk food. (Like WTF this isn't even really moral.)
Like, I think it's interesting to have "holiness" and "unholiness" points. This still allows for you to have things like "holy/righteous swords". But one of the things I enjoy is when holiness is explicitly shown not to be the same as morally good, and you're forced to make your own decisions instead of just having a code of ethics handed to you.
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Sure we can disagree with how well it's done but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. People disagree, disagreements lead to forum discussions and that's bad . . . why?
If you think the implementation is bad you ask the devs to change. Right now I've asked the Solasta devs to add a chaotic good option to list of responses. In the game you are deputized as council representative and you invade the castle of a necromancer to ask for a part of an artifact. When you finally make to the end boss you only have lawful good, lawful neutral and neutral responses. In the logic of the setting, getting the necromancer to hand over the artifact peacefully is lawful good because that's your mandate from the council. But I don't get to say "your evil ends here necromancer" even if that leads to greater evil down the road. My toon doesn't care about the council she is forced to deal with or their stupid laws, she wants to see evil get a smack down.
So I posted a request on the forums of devs. I want my option but I'd be even more upset if the only options left to me were grey morality ones. Because grey is dull color.
With any video game options are handed to you -- if you want to make up your own morality / own stories that's best done in a game without any dialogue options at all. Then you are free to make up any story you like about your toons. But I think we both agree that that would be boring, right?
