Why is it so hard to live with bad video game decisions?

Earlier this week I wrote about how I screwed up a villain, i.e. how I handled a crucial conversation with Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3 so badly that he left my party. In that article I talked about how the negative feelings a work of art can evoke in us are a gift. It was worth sticking with the choices that made Astarion so angry that he dumped me, because it meant I experienced the full range of what the game had to offer, not just save-scumming until I got the best results.

I submitted the article, logged out of Slack, and the next morning saw that my colleague, Features Editor Tessa Kaur, had responded with a Reddit thread describing the issue I encountered in my playthrough and how to fix it. Armed with a potential solution, I couldn’t resist the urge to load my old save and start the conversation over so I could keep Astarion on Team Tav.

The thaumaturge Wiktor in a cutscene with his salutor Upyr, a skeleton phantom with a cane and fur hat, behind him

The Thaumaturge relieves my itch in Baldur’s Gate 3

The fantasy CRPG is part detective and part demon tamer

Do you make good decisions…or not?

This impulse to optimize decisions in video games to make the outcome as pleasant as possible is not uncommon. In fact, RPG developers often say that most players can’t stand making bad decisions in games. They develop a lot of content that players can only see when they go astray, and only a tiny fraction of the player base ever sees it for themselves.

I actually wrote about this back when I was freelancing and interviewing developers of action and role-playing games about this phenomenon. I noticed that there were differences in the morals of players in both genres. In action games, it seemed easier to accept evil behavior because the player had little say in the matter. In Maneater, for example, you play a killer shark that eats people. The main verb is “chew.” That’s all you can really do.

However, RPG developers have found that the vast majority of players choose the “good” options, while only a tiny minority are willing to get their hands dirty. We want to be nice, but more importantly, we’re afraid that being mean will lock us out of important content. When a game gives you the option to do good, it takes more willpower to do evil.

Games are the only medium that can make us feel guilty

Interactive artistic media like video games and board games are the only ones that can appeal to these feelings. I may feel bad when a character dies in a movie, but I don’t feel culpable. However, if I kill an innocent character in a role-playing game, Do Responsibility. I don’t really have to feel bad about it; it’s not real, and games can provide a useful virtual outlet for exploring feelings we don’t want to involve in our real lives. But knowing that dropping the nuke on Megaton doesn’t do any real harm doesn’t necessarily absolve you of real guilt.

Two men look in the direction of the explosion of a nuclear bomb in Fallout 3's megaton nuke.

Some people (I’m one of them) tend to over-analyze their decisions and lie awake at night feeling guilty because they may have hurt someone’s feelings or inadvertently done something bad. That’s the nature of trying to be a good person – sometimes you miss the mark, and the moral vigilance that helps you do good things can turn inward and chastise you when you fail.

With their virtual representations of moral choices, video games can appeal to that same self-flagellating impulse. And even though we know they’re not real and don’t actually matter, the vigilance that keeps us from doing bad things in real life isn’t something we can just turn off. Believe me, I wish that were possible. I want to be evil in a video game that damn evil. I’m missing out on so much content!