Incorporating Social Sanctioning in Video Games
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Part of the reason most people don't kill or murder in real life is that there are real life consequences: social sanction, ostracism, retaliation, incarceration, capital punishment. In games, there are no real life consequences to in-game decisions made regarding AI characters. You won't be labeled, shunned, jailed or executed. Even the in-game consequences are minor; for all of our whining legitimate complaints about 2K Boston/Australia privileging Rescuers over Harvesters by exclusively bestowing upon them the Hypnotize Big Daddy plasmid, it wasn't what we'd consider a hefty punishment.Sounds like a pretty cheap way to try and get some emotional impact in, to me. Fallout tagged you childkiller in game, and there would be social sanctions from other NPCs, that worked fine for me.
But what if developers attempted to bring social sanction into the experience? What if your Gamertag were designated "Child Killer" for having murdered the Little Sisters--or "Good Samaritan" for having saved them? Microsoft recently announced its plans to add the Facebook and MySpace-inspired feature of allowing you to browse your friends' Friends Lists; what if everyone on your Friends List were notified each time you killed a Little Sister--or every time you rescued one--like the Status Updates on Facebook? What if the game maintained a list of everyone you killed in the game, including their names, ages, pre-Adam pictures and a description of how you killed them, for all of your friends to peruse at their leisure? If your peer group were "watching" you, if the Xbox Live community or the entire Internet could keep tabs on your videogame morality, would it change how you played games?
