insofar as I am aware at least, is taking into account player motive. Everything tends to be black and white, if the developer decided that that action was a good action, then you gain alignment points. If the developer decided an action was bad, you lose alignment points. There's very rarely ever and certainly no constant accounting for why the player is doing something. As an example, let's say that irl I am an evil bastard but I do something that people perceive as nice. I did this strictly as a manipulation tactic in order to further my own evil plots but because "it's a nice thing to do" I would gain alignment points by video game rules. Maybe a better example would be a villain who puts on a public face of good guy is giving out free food, ostensibly as an act of charity but really a portion of the food is laced with a compound that will convert the people who eat it into mindless drones. Player motive in relation to their alignment is something no game gets right, and very few that I have played have even tried to address it.

I think thats a case of complexity vs entertainment gain, most devs most likely find it to complex concept to code into a game vs how many players would care to even use such a concept.

Probably because it's really complicated...I mean there's hundreds of thousands if not millions of people that will play this game each with a relatively different character and investment in the game.

Do you really see developers being able to account for every "why" a player could have for making certain choices the game allows...

I mean they could give a variety of "why's" the player could align themselves with.
Ex: the villain you talked about giving about giving free food to appear as a good guy could maybe tell a private confidant or the evil group he's working with why he gave the free food then revealing to the game why you did it and finally allocates off the proper alignment points of whatever... idk I'm not a game Dev.

That type of writing is for the antagonists and NPCs it would take way to much to do that for the PC. they don't make dialog wheels big enough for that.

To complex really, like others have said there's really no way to implement the grey areas of a character that you're roll playing as the devs don't know you.

Safer just to go black and white in the end.

Well, except for decisions that come in conversations, it's kind of hard to measure this. (like, I can't see a game popping up a window every time you shoot someone asking "Why'd you kill this guy? Help people / devious plan / he's in my way / vengeance / killin's fun / etc?")

I think this is left out because, how would you have the game calculate and represent this in in-game factors? Human nature is a very complex thing.

Yeah I know it's pretty much impossible to do properly, but it still bugs me a bit. It's especially bothersome in games where you have companion approval levels, like Dragon Age or better yet, KotOR 2 where your alignment was supposed to affect your companions if they liked you enough, like you could corrupt them or redeem them if you could get them to like you enough. In games like that, you're playing an evil SoB and trying to corrupt the miss goody goody companion so you have to do nice things once in a while to make her like you before you can properly corrupt her and turn her into a sadistic [censored].

I tend to view the whole karma/morality systems as largely how the residents of the world perceive such an action, as opposed to the developers imposing their morals on you or anything like that. So if you steal a loaf of bread, people view that as a bad action and dislike you for it, even if you give it to some starving beggar. The people who witness and hear about your actions aren't likely going to know your motivations, they just know what you did and judge you for it accordingly.

I think you would have better luck going out and doing that in real life, where the system is refined, than in any video game.

Even KOTOR 2's influence system wasn't exactly in depth.

Yeah, I think I agree to that. And besides making sure the game knows your motives is kinda pointless, cause nobody cares about your motives except you. And you don't need the game to track them.

Yeah, it also does kinda work out like OP desires as well as it is, for if you steal that loaf of bread, for example, you do lose karma, but then when you give it to the beggar you gain karma and probably result overall in a net gain of karma. So if your motives for committing the immoral act are pure you likely will be rewarded for it with positive karma in the end. It's fine the way it's implemented, the only issue I agree is problematic is that you still lose and gain karma even when nobody witnesses what you've done. If there's absolutely no witnesses it doesn't make a whole heap of sense to lose karma for planting a live grenade on some NPC out in the middle of nowhere and making it rain.

It's a very minor issue for me, though, and can always be explained with "word gets around", no matter how stretched that may become within the confines of the game.

I just began thinking it would be a rather simple task to answer your quest for some functional AI.

Then i was pressing the same button two times and g it proven to be simple.

Allright, what i liked to say.

It is really nothing of a miracle or difficult programming adding that Align in function to a game.

explain:

localisation, ego, from to

able per a sec. total max at time

makes a matrix border length

what has definition at any single point

obpression, commercial obpression and used presence and socialisation of ground alongside the actual in fact taking place happenings(influencies) alter any situation taking place by changing the modulation of align

base align

shift align

modulation align

modulated align

temprary align (solely for math purpose)

memory align

any value of impressive appearance has a place as formerly noted on that "social" matrix.

the rest should be fairly easy to comprehend.

To bad, that bethesda is not much into revolving works.

They care more about clients can put themselfes into that stuff, and their graphics as well as military requests of diplomatic integrity, what is having them mostly out of the science direction.

Might need somebody like Blizzard(inventign .dll) or abother company making in production of that PC stuff like unreal or egosoft...

EDIT -- btw, you are the first forum entry i found having an easy question. Thanks and i hope this is explaintive enough.

Well, you'll be forever disappointed in that aspect, OP, unless they figure out how to read your mind. Only you know your true intentions.

Unless they're tying it heavily into the gameplay (think about the Star Wars games that let you choose between light and dark side and how that opens up new powers for you) there's really no point in including it in most games that do include it. I feel Obsidian's way of doing things in NV were a great step in the right direction with basing things off reputation instead of karma (karma plays a very minor role in NV and even then it's meh). The thing that really makes it tick is that it doesn't follow the rule of one good deed and one bad deed cancel each other out because you independently gain both positive and negative reputation with factions. It switches the perspective from how you view your true intentions to how they view your actions.

I quite like the way that FNV handled it in that you gain or lose reputation with various factions.

Who cares about your motivation if they become more or less pleased with you (perhaps even in advance of a dastardly betrayal).

I think reputation is the way to go.

I'm not a fan of alignment in most games, either (I tend to prefer when reactions are to individual events more than anything - and especially when you're supposed to be caught in a moral quandary it takes away from that if the game then tells you what the "right" action was supposed to have been, a la The Pitt.)

But I don't know how you'd even begin to factor in player motivation. I've tooled around with the concept of some of these games questioning the player more about their motivations, but even then you're just locked into whatever options the designers have thought to put in. It's an age-old trope of roleplaying games that players will always come up with ways to surprise Game Masters - even more so in a videogame where you can't improvise through those surprises. No matter how many "motivation" options you were to put in, you're going to have players who come up with something the designers hadn't thought of.

The best middle-ground I would think is that if you're going to work in an alignment system that it concern itself more with morality than ethics, if that makes any sense.

Edit: I might have that backwards, anyway. What I was thinking was that if you're going to have a numerical alignment rating that it's probably best you keep it as pragmatic as possible. Lots of actions might ultimately be balanced out by "the greater good" but can in themselves be "bad" actions. Robin Hood might give to the poor, but he still steals from the rich. Overall maybe he's a "good guy," but he ain't exactly Mother Theresa, either. (So Robin Hood might have net "Light Side" points, but they wouldn't be as high as Mother Theresa's score, because Robin's is counter-balanced by all the law-breaking he does.)

Or even just try to find some way to define a sort of D&D alignment into the game in a procedural way, that while still kind of arbitrary at least conveys some nuance to the system. I don't know how you'd do that off-hand, but probably you could break actions up between your feelings about law and order (Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic) and society (Good, Neutral, or Evil.)

I'd rather have more of this stuff rather than settlement building and usable vertibirds.

I don't think it'd be nearly as difficult to program a "three-dimensional" alignment system as it would be to reprogram all the developers and gamers who are hardwired to think in terms of Lawful <=> Chaotic/Good <=> Evil. The two-axis alignment system is a paradigm that needs to go the hell away, thank you very much, Gary Gygax.

Problem is the use of mutually exclusive "Good" and "Evil". Mass Effects non-mutually exclusive "Paragon"/"Renegade" was a better idea. Or New Vegas' faction reputations, without a "karma" meter.

Why New Vegas even had karma i still don't understand Especially given that it was completely trivialized when killing certain enemies rewarded it, meaning every character ended up as "Very Good". Except perhaps pacifists? Which would be pretty damn ironic

But i have never seen a good morality system in a game. Only more and less bad ones

I agree with this post 100%.

I thought Oblivion was another game that handled this a little better than most. We could have Fame and Infamy at the same time. I thought that added a bit of ambiguity to our moral alignment. It left a lot to be desired, but it was a notch above the primitive zero-sum business you usually find in Bioware's games.

If you're so insidious in giving out food, why would the faction hate you? Outwardly you're doing something nice for them, that's all they can perceive anyway. Isn't that the point of being insidious?

TBH I hope the Karma system is scrapped and a theirs a better reputation system to replace it.

I don't think you could measure it with a single indicator. The simplest you could do would be to have a single indicator like alignment or karma that would adjust no matter who saw you but would also only have a subtle effect on NPCs in the world. Then you'd have to have a reputation system on top of that which would only adjust if you were observed by an NPC.

So if you are in the middle of a cave system and murder a single explorer, the alignment/karma would slide toward evil but otherwise no one's the wiser. If you were in the middle of the street in a town full of people and did the same then your alignment/karma would slide toward evil and so would your reputation. The only effect that alignment/karma would have on the world would be that very perceptive people would get a bad feeling around you if you are evil or certain items and creatures that can totally perceive it would react accordingly.

With games there are just too many variables to be able to gauge motivation and adjust the alignment/karma properly unless you had ridiculously huge conversation trees or if a menu pops up every time you perform an action that may adjust alignment so that you could give a reason why you are doing what you are doing.