What was the original moralfaggot game?

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I watched a retrospective of Ultima 6, which in current cultural lens was very much a prototype of the modern trend of a game criticising player actions for an action despite the player having little choice or sane way to know he is doing a wrong action.

Spoiler: Game event

In the game you discover that the giant red naked demon people you retrieved an artifact from two games prior were actually dindus all along, making you a villain because that action also caused a full on genocide of the race, and in a setting with magic to resurrect people there is no translation spell.

So that's got me thinking, are there even earlier cases of such games? Or if you think I'm wrong what was the first example of those games?

 

[Übertroon]

Monopoly the boardgame. Made by a childless feminist who thought owning property was evil so she made a game where the person with the most property fucks over everyone else and ruins an evening

 

[libRT]

Don't know the original moralfag game but i remember playing ultima 4 and you had to act in such a way to represent the games virtues and when you've done so you go to a shrine (once for each virtue) to ascend and do something, I never finished it. but like for the 'honesty' virtue, if you stole from chests, or tricked the reagent seller (she asked you how much you would pay, me as a kid didn't understand and loaded up on next to free reagents lol) there was a hidden value that would go down, and would go up if you were honest and shit.

 

[mofu mofo]

In Black & White the god that you control slowly changes shape depending on how you treat your villagers.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I could be wrong, but I remember hearing one of the Fable games did this. The good choice, and the evil choice for money. Things like draining the local lake and strip mining it. However, you needed money to build something to stop the apocalypse.

 

[From The Uncanny Valley]

SPEC OPS THE LINE

/THREAD

 

[Necrosan]

Pac-Man.

He just kneeled on those ghosts who just wanted bouncing fruits.

 

[Diesel Boogaloo]

I think in case of Ultima, it started at least with Ultima IV (1985), if not earlier.

But for the trve original moralfaggot game, it's obviously Snakes And Ladders.

The game was popular in ancient India by the name Moksha Patam. It was also associated with traditional Hindu philosophy contrasting karma and kama, or destiny and desire. It emphasized destiny, as opposed to games such as pachisi, which focused on life as a mixture of skill (free will)[5] and luck. The underlying ideals of the game inspired a version introduced in Victorian England in 1892. The game has also been interpreted and used as a tool for teaching the effects of good deeds versus bad. The board was covered with symbolic images used in ancient India, the top featuring gods, angels, and majestic beings, while the rest of the board was covered with pictures of animals, flowers and people.[6] The ladders represented virtues such as generosity, faith, and humility, while the snakes represented vices such as lust, anger, murder, and theft. The morality lesson of the game was that a person can attain liberation (Moksha) through doing good, whereas by doing evil one will be reborn as lower forms of life. The number of ladders was fewer than the number of snakes as a reminder that a path of good is much more difficult to tread than a path of sins. Presumably, reaching the last square (number 100) represented the attainment of Moksha (spiritual liberation).

 

[marvlouslie]

I could be wrong, but I remember hearing one of the Fable games did this. The good choice, and the evil choice for money. Things like draining the local lake and strip mining it. However, you needed money to build something to stop the apocalypse.

Fable III did this. You either be remembered as a benevolent king that didn't do enough to prepare his kingdom for the coming apocalypse, or you'll be remembered as a tyrant who worked his people to death. You were fucked either way, and seeing how the landscape changed due to your decisions was actually kind of cool, but the entire set up of "choices" were terrible, because Peter can't write for shit.

I remember Fable II trying something similar with bringing people back to life, and after making your choice, Not Kreiya tells you to fuck off and get out of her tower.

 

[legtard respecter]

Monopoly the boardgame. Made by a childless feminist who thought owning property was evil so she made a game where the person with the most property fucks over everyone else and ruins an evening

yet if everyone plays competently it just stalemates forever unless you use house rules that actually fix it

 

[Tablet County]

Fable III did this. You either be remembered as a benevolent king that didn't do enough to prepare his kingdom for the coming apocalypse, or you'll be remembered as a tyrant who worked his people to death. You were fucked either way,

Unless you play the housing market. Then you'll have all the money in the world for your defense fund without having to make sacrifices.
Capitalism wins again!

 

[Sir Baz the Intolerant]

Fable III did this. You either be remembered as a benevolent king that didn't do enough to prepare his kingdom for the coming apocalypse, or you'll be remembered as a tyrant who worked his people to death. You were fucked either way, and seeing how the landscape changed due to your decisions was actually kind of cool, but the entire set up of "choices" were terrible, because Peter can't write for shit.

I remember Fable II trying something similar with bringing people back to life, and after making your choice, Not Kreiya tells you to fuck off and get out of her tower.

The Fable trilogy can be best described as a genuinely genius set of ideas being held back by the limitations of technology and Peter Molyneux's limitless retardation.

 

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

I like Majuular too.

 

[Cnidarian]

But for the trve original moralfaggot game, it's obviously Snakes And Ladders.

Missionaries of any faith can reinvent this game as an explicit argument against Hinduism in the style of Monopoly. Rewards and punishments are the same for all purposes until your infinite rerolling period is over.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

Mass effect pits you in a grand space opera, where your choices affect the outcome of countless of species and gives you the complex moral choice if you want the final cutscene to be blue red or green.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

I was going to mention Mass Effect

I didn't like how a lot of the Renegade choices in the first one were presented as bad when they were the smart choices, or at worst, pragmatic.

As the series went on, Renegade just became "bad" or "jerk for no reason"

Mass Effect really sucks now that I'm not 18 and had to live real life.

 

[Dysnomia]

There's a Famicom/MSX game called Romancia. It's also known as Dragon Slayer Jr and s part of the Dragon Slayer series. But the cutesy name and graphics only make it look like it's for small children. It's an insanely hard game where you must do everything exactly one way or you cannot win. There's no saves so you have to do it in a single playthrough. If you fail you go right back to the beginning to try all over again. Although you can continue in the MSX version and you can gain a bunch of extra lives with an optional patch for the fan translation.

The whole game is trial and error and you will never be able to finish it on the first try without a guide. Because everything you do is tied to this karma system represented by a ring icon on the HUD. Every time you do a good deed you get a gold ring. But every time you do something bad you lose one. Once you get to town and start doing good deeds you are bound to extreme moralfagging in order to keep every ring you've collected. If you kill enemies you lose rings. You cannot obtain the items that you need and uncurse things unless you have a certain amount of rings. Later in the game you can get more rings via a tedious process and you pretty much have to do this in order to get more gold to complete the gear you need for the boss. But if you aren't careful you can still screw yourself over in a lot of ways.

Super Hydlide also had a system where certain monsters were "good" monsters and you weren't supposed to kill them. Doing so lowers a stat that you need to complete some tasks, making the game harder.

 

[Kung Pow]

If you want to go really far back, the very first moral game was probably Missile Command.
Its a game where you fire missiles to destroy other missiles so you can protect other cities and it was an endless game as was the tradition at the time, you will inevitably lose no matter what. It was made as an anti nuclear war game during the Cold War.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

SimCity deserves a mention for being a very early and very different form of moralfagging, or maybe ideologyfagging in this case.

Personally I'm curious what the first game was to actively punish you for picking an 'evil' option that wasn't clearly presented as one. Games like Romancia mentioned above that just use morality as a form of healthbar are annoying, but I can remember some Apple 2 text adventures (no idea on the names, it was 30+ years ago) that'd give you multiple choice options and have a couple of the choices come out far crueler than they were implied to be just so the game could dump a text wall about how what you did was BAD before it gave you a game over.

 

[I'm Really Feeling It]

I was going to mention Mass Effect

I didn't like how a lot of the Renegade choices in the first one were presented as bad when they were the smart choices, or at worst, pragmatic.

As the series went on, Renegade just became "bad" or "jerk for no reason"

Mass Effect really sucks now that I'm not 18 and had to live real life.

In my opinion, in 1 and 2 you could be a jerk and it'd come off like you're a somewhat impatient but stringent commander. If an option was too jerk-ish at least you had the Neutral choice. 3 got rid of it, and it also had the thing you mentioned about just being an ass but not really deviating. There wasn't much about moralfagging especially in 1 where you could be just as racist as Ashley.

(My first ever run of the games I was half-Paragon and half-Renegade in 1 and 2. 3 left little in the way of interesting Renegade options.)

Bonus: