There is a recurring theme in gaming which has become increasingly popular over the last decade. We’ve seen it done subtly in games like Mass Effect, and we have seen it done more obviously in games like Fallout 3. Karma, or the karmic meter in games, has become such an obvious meme that it has almost become a staple of RPGs these days; but no game has ever delivered quite so unabashedly as inFamous.
Because fuck cars, that’s why…inFamous tells the story of Cole MacGrath - a courier tasked with delivering a seemingly normal package to a peculiar address. When Cole arrives at where he must deliver the package he sees that it is addressed to him. He opens the package and causes a devastating explosion which not only destroys the area, but sucks the life-force from the people around him. This life-force is channeled into Cole, giving him superpowers. Cole is now basically Thor without the need of Mjolnir: he can leap off massive building and not die, he can summon lightning, and he can even blow up cars. Cole blows up a lot of cars.
Understandably, society now thinks Cole is a terrorist - he set off a bomb and killed a lot of people. The city is now under quarantine and its people are sick and hungry. Humanity likes scapegoats, and Cole MacGrath, while being superhuman is seen as subhuman in the eyes of society, and becomes an easy target.
The question begging to be answered is whether you cave to the pressure of society loathing you, or do you hold your head up high and try to save society from imploding? Are you going to be wholly good or wholly evil?
Hero Cole is Handsome ColeIn Mass Effect, Commander Shepherd can either be a Renegade or a Paragon, depending on whether or not you hit quick time events (QTEs) to react to particular situations. For example, if a member of the press is accusing you of the death of civilians to sell lies as news, you can either talk to her about it, or tap a button that flashes on screen and to smack her in the mouth; if a guard is being a pain, you can either take them to task nicely, or shoot him in the face. It doesn’t make a massive change to your ultimate story, but these subtle changes make a big impact to your experience. Commander Shepherd is always your Shepherd, and no two Shepherds are ever the same.
In Fallout 3, Bethesda created the Megaton incident. A ramshackle but thriving town in the middle of the nuclear wastelad - so named for the idle nuclear warhead in the middle of town - you need to decide whether you’ll blow it up, which nets you a large sum of money and a free house, or if you’ll take on the assassins sent after you for doing the right thing and defusing the bomb. It would have been nice to have had a third option where doing nothing has its own repercussions, such as an NPC making the decision for you while you do nothing, but that is not the case. Either choice you make a massive difference to how your game treats you.
Hero Cole takes the time to aiminFamous is more similar to Fallout 3 than Mass Effect in this respect, but is entirely ham-fisted in its approach to moral quandaries. Don’t get me wrong; I loved inFamous, and even managed to get the elusive Platinum Trophy for achieving 100% completion in a game notoriously hard to fully complete. I really loved the game - but that doesn’t make its binary karma system any less lazy. You can be good, or you can be evil; take the middle ground, and you’re punished by being prevented from obtaining the most powerful attacks.
An argument could be made in defense of inFamous; after all, you get two different stories for your money depending on how you play. Take the goody goody route, playing as Saint Cole rescuing kittens from trees, and you’re able to become a paragon of justice, loved by society.
Asshole Cole is seemingly made of ashHowever, you could pick the evil route, choosing to be the kind of Cole MacGrath who takes ultimate power by killing civilians in the street and electrocuting the metaphorical kittens in the trees instead of saving them [Editor's Note: No kittens were harmed during the writing of this article]. Played this way, Cole’s corruption manifests itself physically; his skin becomes becomes ashen and he seems to have lava in is veins.
But while there are two stories, neither route results in a Cole that truly feels as though he has been shaped by your actions; you simply play the game twice - once on easy as Sickeningly Good Cole, and once on hard as Comically Evil Cole. One is a parody of the other, and when you know that Evil Cole is ultimately stronger than Good Cole, it boils down to a game of numbers. Numbers are fucking boring. If we wanted to play a game of numbers, we would play on a calculator. I completed inFamous as the good guy, just to spite the game. I then completed it as comically Evil Cole on hard, and it’s a cake-walk. But despite repeated playthroughs, I never cared about Cole. Despite the best efforts of the developer, whether you take the route of saint or sinner, he remains a one-dimensional, drab, boring character.
No shades of grey hereFor a game whose selling point is that you can play the game how you like, this is an astoundingly simple point to miss; society is not black and white (or blue and red in this case), and trying to neatly file a character into these two paradigms while maintaining any real semblance of human depth won’t work. Cole is neither God nor Satan - he is a human with human problems, and he should bloody well start acting as one.
While there is nothing locking your choices into either paradigm, if you want a fully-powered character you have to stick to your guns; if you change your mind half way through the game and decide to bat for the other team, you will face off against the last boss with half of your maximum power. Considering how much health the last boss has, this is a very naive way to play inFamous, and you will not enjoy the game.
We went into inFamous 2 hoping that it would have learned from the mistakes of it’s forebear; but unfortunately, the sequel is equally bland in terms of your moral choices. “Do you want to be wholly good or wholly evil? Now you’ve completed the game, do it again and be the polar opposite” - inFamous 2 is more of the same and equally contrived.
So what does this say about future games? Not a lot, I’m afraid; as sick as I am of this half-arsed attempt of building a relatable character, it seems the binary karma system of Good vs Evil is here to stay. I, for one, am hopeful for more games which take the Mass Effect system under consideration, or to take a similar approach to Fallout, but with more room and repercussions for moral ambiguity and refusing to make the hard moral choices. No single person in real life is wholly good or wholly evil, and unless I am playing Satan in a game, I don’t really want my character to be wholly good or totally evil. I want to play a character who could exist in the real world - one that I can relate to one way or the other; if you want a character that exists in a society which resembles your own, then like me, this infamous paradigm is not for you.
Nic Bunce
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