My favourite classes in university were those that had to do with the study of ethics. It should come as no surprise, then, that many of my favourite video games force players to make moral decisions. I choose to do good almost every time, but having the option to do bad-even if it is never exercised-can make a game far more immersive, believable, and compelling.
Morality is what inFAMOUS, a new PlayStation 3 exclusive from Sucker Punch (the same folks who brought us the excellent and underappreciated Sly Cooper games), is all about. The game revolves around a courier named Cole who, while delivering a strange package, is caught at ground zero of a massive explosion that levels several blocks and causes the quarantine of three island boroughs in Empire City.
While many of the city's people lay sick or dying, Cole somehow survives unscathed. Not only that, he is now in possession of immense strength, the ability to scale the sides of tall buildings in seconds, and a wide variety of electricity-based powers. He is, in other words, a superhero-and in the middle of a city in dire need of someone with abilities like his.
Thing is, the digital denizens of Empire City have it in their heads that Cole's a terrorist, that he's the one who caused the explosion. Our mission as we travel throughout the game's expansive, free-to-roam urban wasteland, is to either help those in need despite their hatred of Cole (which reminded me of an African Canadian paramedic I once knew who said she sometimes encountered hatred and racism from the very people she tried to help), or simply do what's best for Cole and use Empire City's citizens to serve that purpose.
For example, one mission has Cole shutting down sewage valves that are pumping toxic sludge into the city's water system and making everyone sick. However, after spinning one of the valves and getting sprayed with a tarry substance that sends him into nightmarish hallucination, he naturally hesitates before doing it a second time. We hear him thinking to himself: "If I turn this valve, I'll take another blast of crud to the face, probably screw me up, send me on another mind trip," before turning his attention to a nearby pedestrian and continuing, "...or maybe I could force this guy to do it for me."
His indecision, sense of self-preservation, and consideration of other options-even ones that most of us would deem "evil"-is completely authentic. We understand where he's coming from because, were we in his shoes, we'd probably be thinking the same thing. That makes our decisions all the more meaningful. What would we do if it was real, and we were the ones facing possible death? Even if our choices in the game are opposite what they would be in life, the fact that inFAMOUS makes us pause to think about the morality of our actions is significant.
These ethical questions are injected into just about every facet of the game. When you take down a bad guy, for example, you can choose to either restrain him with some funky electrical handcuffs or draw out his bioelectrical current, recharging Cole but killing the subject in the process. What's more, hundreds of injured citizens are simply lying around Empire City, waiting to die. Do you just pass them by, or do you take the time to stop and help them, healing them with an electrical jolt but receiving little in the way of personal gain?
Of course, inFAMOUS isn't all just weighty moral dilemmas. The action elements are, in fact, marvellously entertaining. The game's controls and movement aids-Cole is gently pulled toward safe landing areas while in the air-make navigation wonderfully intuitive and frustration free. Indeed, exploring Empire City by climbing pipes and window ledges, sliding between buildings on power lines, and grinding el-train rails is a blast.
And Cole's electrical powers are awesome. I've experienced few things more satisfying in a game this year than leaping from a 20-storey building and making a thunderous landing, sending enemies sprawling in all directions, then using a mixture of lightning bolts and electrical grenades to finish them off.
As is often the case in open-world games, things eventually start to become a bit monotonous. Scores of side-missions designed to clear Empire City of its gangsters a couple of blocks at a time boil down to little more than attacking particular groups of bad guys over and over again. It gets repetitive quickly, and serves to dampen the game's pace. Still, the morality-driven story, when you eventually return to it, rarely sags.
The likelihood that we might one day wake up with super powers may be nil, but the exercise of imagining the sort of opportunity and accountability that would come with these powers has value. I firmly believe that video games, at their best, have the ability to tell us something about ourselves, and inFAMOUS is as good an example as any of this wonderful-if unfortunately rare-phenomenon.
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