Welcome to Gaia! ::

Let me explain where this is coming from....

So I'm a long time MMO player, and my favorite is Star Wars the Old Republic. Throughout the game you have to make choices on morality, Light side or Dark side, generically good and evil. A lot of them are straightforward one or the other, kill the captain or spare him, leave the dignitary behind or save her. Not hard choices to understand usually, though the good ones might be hard to make.

They also have flashpoints, giant four person group instances where a series of objectives are completed and usually end or contain one major light side or dark side choice. Again, most choices are easy to understand why they're one or the other, but there is one instance called "Cadmieu" on the planet of the same name.

In the mission your imperial group is on the planet to stop the rebelling governor from using the planets massive number of missiles to stay independent in the war between the Empire and the Republic. It's pretty straightforward up until you make the one LS/DS choice. The missiles have been set to launch, and locked down from the outside. Your terminal cannot stop the missile launch at the Imperial Fleet, but you CAN redirect them to one of two locations.

Either you aim it at the Republic Fleet, decimating them and costing the republic hundreds of thousands of lives. This is the darkside choice. OR you can launch them at an uninhabited moon, the lightside choice.

But, to tie in the thread's main question, how are these choice affiliations legitimate?

Attacking the Republic is costly yes, and it causes lots of deaths, but it is a legitimate act of war and understandable from the perspective of a warfaring nation.

But hitting a moon with that many kilotons of explosives would impact an entire planet, changing anything affiliated with a moon, such as lunar cycles, and tide cycles. Such a dramatic change would be extremely costly, disrupting entire ecosystems, perhaps causing the extinction of rare species, surely causing millions of deaths by the time the planet can adjust to a new planet wide ecosystem.


SO in the end, the "Good" choice is understandable as being what you may do to not be evil, but it is a much more despicible and evil outcome than the "evil" choice a bad guy would make in a split second.

So the bad guy would make, in the end, less destruction than a good guy. What I'm trying to aks is, are all darkside/evil/whatever you wanna say choices really evil?

I wouldn't think too hard on it as far as video game morality systems go. They're almost always pretty dumb.

heart Evil is a matter of intent and the choices made upon that intent. Hence the difference between something evil and an honest, yet possibly regrettable mistake. heart

heart Indeed I have. 3nodding heart

heart Excellent question. I would definitely hold him accountable for his intent. Since the event led to his demise, yet also the salvation of Middle Earth, I would leave the matter in God's hands from that point forward. Then again, the judgment of one's soul is a matter of the afterlife anyhow. The same applies to one who intends good, but where their actions result in harm. Some reprimand is due, just as some element of perceived redemption may be applied on the flip side, but all in all, with good intentions, I would not be so quick to judge an act as evil. 3nodding heart

heart It makes perfect sense. heart

Ethics and morality is always an interesting outlook to people. It's one of the very reasons why videogames have been using morality systems as a basis for years. I think the very first was an NES game starring a popular Nintendo character: Pit. However, I can't recall the name.

Anyway, morality/ethics is extremely complicated for one of the soul reasons that many of these games seem to not understand, that being that what is good/bad isn't always black and white.
When it comes to what you wish to do, your actions can have many different outcomes and most of the time your actions will be based on the preferred outcome. Sometimes on purpose and sometimes on accident.
For example, a character could have the intentions of doing good and doing what he/she/it thinks is best for the situation. However, the outcome turns out pretty bad. Does that make the action itself bad? I would disagree, as the intention was strictly of trying to do what is good and better for everyone. The outcome just happened to sour and turn out to be different from how such a character thought.

Sometimes, you have to do bad to do good. How many videogames have you played where you have to kill one or more people to save the life of others? Have you ever wondered what sacrificing the lives of these people meant morally? I mean, surely those were just as alive as the others. Maybe not as innocent but still living people.

Just remember that not everything can be one or the other. Sometimes, something can't be purely good or purely evil. You will sometimes have to do something kinda bad for a pretty good outcome, or vice versa.