Devs Weigh In On Playing The Bad Guy

Posted by Zonk on Saturday August 27, 2005 @05:02AM from the it's-good-to-be-bad dept.

Gamecloud has an article that goes into detail about the good, bad, and fun of playing a villain in a game. The article refers to several psychological studies, and has developer commentary from across the game design board. From CliffyB's comments: "Video games are a playable fantasy and there are few things more alluring than living out the fantasy of being evil and doing bad or illegal actions without any real world repercussions. As a designer, the best thing I can do when I allow the user to indulge in that fantasy is to show that there are ramifications for those actions. In GTA the more police you attack the harder the game gets, ultimately resulting in capture or death."

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Not very realistic ramifications ... by dougmc · 2005-08-27 05:41 · Score: 4, Insightful

As a designer, the best thing I can do when I allow the user to indulge in that fantasy is to show that there are ramifications for those actions. In GTA the more police you attack the harder the game gets, ultimately resulting in capture or death."
To be fair, you may show that there are ramifications, but your ramifications are not very realistic.
In the real world, attacking even one police officer, even in a minor way, is going to do far more than making life more difficult. You're likely to end up captured or dead very shortly -- and in either case, you can't just hit reload.
Granted, GTA is a game and you play by game rules, but by adding ramifications to `bad' actions, you're not really teaching morality or anything else like that. You're just making the game more fun. (Which is a good thing, don't get me wrong.)