Articles on good and evil in gaming (23/1/2014)

* During today's session we continued to focus on key words and texts so as to expand our research.
Therefore, I decided to try and find some examples online and look back at some previous ones already recommended to me.

• Read the article I found two weeks ago 'Babies know the difference between good and evil at six months' (2010) in which it discussed a study about how children reacted differently during a puppet show. Findings showed, that they reacted positively towards the helpful puppet and negatively towards the naughty one. One child even punished a naughty puppet with a smack. It was an interesting article, but I felt the evidence wasn't conducted on a wide enough demographic. I even  found a comment stating that the research should have gone further. For example, they should have had an adult puppet tell two child puppets not to go into an area as it was dangerous, therefore when one tried to go in and the other stopped it it would be for their safety, not as a an obstruction which may have been seen without any context. Still, it is an interesting field of research which suggests babies may be born with some 'understanding' of good and evil even before nurture and environment influence them.
• I then looked at the article 'Moral Decision Making in Fallout' which was recommended to me AGES ago. In short it related rather closely to the example below which I read just before.

* Adam who is also looking up morality in gaming recommended that I include the characters' motivations and shared with me an article on Dorkly '5 Mistakes Every Videogame With A Morality System Makes' (2013).

Reading it I found that, although games may provide a morality system there is never a middle ground. In most examples of these types types of games you will never see anyone swap between the options good and evil. This is especially obvious whenever you choose to be evil as it is often cartoon villainy in comparison to the villain you are tasked on defeating. 
Often most players will pick just the one morality and do that for the whole of the game, especially since a lot of games reward players for becoming completely good or evil. However, often it is only the good path that leads into the sequel and not the evil path, thus your decisions that should carry over don't completely.  

However, it was good to point out that 'Dragon Age: Origins' and the 'Fallout' series deal with morality appropriately as it doesn't state whether you are good or evil, instead the people around you see you differently and either agree or disagree with your decisions. This is interesting as I had already used the 'Fallout' series and 'Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic' (almost identical to 'Dragon Age: Origins') as examples of games with morality since I remembered them as being unique.

* The lecturer also recommended that we use the website http://gamestudies.org/1302 to find more gaming articles that may relate to our work.  

* Overall, I will need to try and find an example that grabs me the most as, although some articles talk about morality they don't cover exactly what I want to talk about.

Harvard Referencing:

• Takacs, M (2013) 5 Mistakes Every Video Game With A Morality System Makes. Available at: http://www.dorkly.com/article/56575/5-mistakes-every-videogame-with-a-morality-system-makes (Accessed: 23/1/2014).
• Game Studies (Unknown) Game Studies. Available at: http://gamestudies.org/1302 (Accessed: 23/1/2014).