I have escaped reality. My name is John Pilgrim and I am a cancer researcher in a nameless city punctuated by an ambiguous mountain range in the distance of my one-floor home and a blatantly automated carousel of cars and pedestrians beneath the skyscrapers looming over my morning commute. I am a father to a loving daughter and husband to a stay-at-home mom, both of whom share an equally nameless existence. But over the course of the following week, a surprise salvation from one of humanity’s most complex and lethal threats will sour into debilitating disaster, then slowly dissolve into hopelessness before time and consequence are swallowed by extinction.

“In six days, every living cell on Planet Earth will be dead. You have one chance.” The words are displayed on a black screen in a plain, white font.

Pilgrim exists within the confines of a graphically retro-laden 15-minute flash game called One Chance. Independent UK studio Awkward Silence Games released it in December of 2010, yet it still worms its way into indie game conversations because the title is no joke. As soon as one clicks play, the website, flash game haven Newgrounds.com in this case, logs your IP address, preventing one from ever starting over on that same computer.

The game’s buttons are limited; you move with the arrow keys and interact with the space bar. You play through six days approaching the end of the world, where various choices determine how you spend John’s final moments and subsequently how those choices affect those around you. After all, the short, four-line description of the game begins with, “One Chance is a game about choices and dealing with them.”

On day one, I see off my wife and daughter and read the morning’s newspaper, with my picture on the front page and the announcement of cancer’s cure is decorated with hope. When I arrive at work, the mood is high, elated even, and I am presented with my first choice – skip work or stay at the lab to run more tests. I forgo staying at the lab to grab a drink with co-workers.

The following morning my wife alerts me that the phone has been ringing non-stop, and that day’s newspaper confirms the air of anxiety – my company’s cancer treatment has deadly, and viral, side effects. The lab is an antithetical disaster-scene compared with the day before, and I am gently forced to explore the roof of the building, where an overwhelmingly guilty co-worker commits suicide by jumping off the roof.

The next day I refuse to leave work to see my family and instead stay in the lab searching for a cure, but this appears to result in my wife’s depression; she refuses to get out of bed the next morning. My daughter stands upset and confused in the living room, ignorant to our shared fate. But I must go to the lab again.

My barrage of seemingly horrible choices must mean that I have resigned John Pilgrim to a chaotic and immoral end. When given the option, I decide to cheat on my wife with a co-worker, only to come home late that night to discover she has committed suicide as well. I am finding it difficult to determine whether I am making these choices because I know the game is granting me this freedom to be explored, or because I have a subconscious desire to subject these virtual people to the consequences of deplorable decisions. I find myself grinning at the idea of robbing these characters of any relatable realism and indulging in the fantasy of a post-apocalyptic world that has turned morality upside down.

In my final days, I take my daughter with me to work instead of opting for the park, and our skin turns from a shade of peach to a grim gray. I start walking slower. On my final day, the singular glimmer of hope—in fiction a cure, but in reality just a clever arrangement of cause and effect correctly executed by the player—fades into nothingness. I leave my daughter, apparently too weak to keep moving, at the front door of the lab. I head up to the roof where I am to my utter disbelief given the option, “Give up.” The choice is jarring, both for its concrete admission of suicide and the eerie likeness it has to the spontaneity one might feel when staring a meaningless existence in the face.

I hit the space bar, and John Pilgrim spreads his arms out wide and falls to his death. Now every time I attempt to play One Chance on my laptop, I see snow falling on an empty rooftop. No matter how elementary the game is, or how extreme its choices are, it hits home one clear and simple fact that most video games today are trying to convey: in life, your choices stay with you.

The Emergence of Morality

he evolution from choice making in video games to questioning the morality of players is not an entirely new development. It has been manifesting itself both on large and small scales over the last decade, in games with preexisting divisions, like 2003’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and its already iconic light and dark sides, or in games that were marketed entirely on the option to be “good” or “bad,” the first of which many consider to be Lionhead Studios’ Fable, released in 2004.

But what is integral to the relevance and breadth of the video game is not the fact that the medium has been treading this territory; rather, equipped with such narrative, visual and emotional devices, games can now say something wholly unique about us as moral, choice-making individuals, and push us to question what it is we truly play for and who we are in that context.

Even further, the matter of how and why the fastest-growing entertainment medium of all time has achieved such a reflexive, complex relationship with consumers is an equally important question. Video games sit near the peak of media, with an industry valued at roughly $18.6 billion dollars in 2010 in the U.S. alone according to the NPD Group, Inc. Their roles in the lives of not just youths, but entertainment consumers of all ages and locales, now play an central role in the development of pop culture and how our relationship with that culture develops us.

“These games have attempted through their realism to try to usurp some of the basic ways that we negotiate the world around us, and that happens to be through choice making,” says Raiford Guins, an associate professor of digital cultural studies at Stony Brook University who specializes in video game history and preservation.

Coming in at a neck-bending height and donning the casual attire of an off-season track runner, Guins doesn’t appear, at first glance, to be the person you’d expect to lecture students on video games or discussing the philosophical elements of the medium. But one look at his office, with shelves of decades-old games and Grand Theft Auto posters plastered to its walls, and his off-the-cuff mention of his upcoming book, an academic analysis of video game preservation, shatters nearly every misconception.

For Guins, the development of choice and the incorporation of morality-based game mechanics is due in part to a series of foundational leaps in video game development and players’ demands for sophistication, both of which worked in tandem toward the evolution of the medium.

“As the options became more sophisticated, our choices grew in their density. In a lot of early games, the choice was basically to hit the fire button, to hit the fire button effectively, to defeat a boss, to go up in level…” he says. “So as games gave us more opportunities to inhabit their worlds in different ways, that’s when choice became one of the key aspects of gameplay.”

This generalized development, this increase in sophistication, comes in two flavors: that of the moral development variety and that of the character development variety. The intrinsic relationship between inhabiting a character and being responsible for the actions you make as that character grew from a number of factors now seen as momentous influences to modern video games.

“If we go back to Dungeons & Dragons, when one rolls up their character, one chooses a certain kind of moral classification—neutral, lawful evil, chaotic good,” Guins explains, using the term “roll up” to mean the physical rolling of the now iconic twelve-sided die. “When you choose that kind of categorization for your character, there are certain rules in the game that mean your character can act accordingly. So a lawful evil player can only do certain things, a chaotic good player can only act in certain ways.”

Being chaotically good or lawfully evil is, in a simplified and elementary way, a personality structure. This ability to choose and classify, alongside the fact that such a choice has lasting consequences, is at the very heart of moral decision-making. The person you are, your personality, manifests itself in the choices you make, which then reflect back upon you.

A modern game often praised for its significant steps in the incorporation of complex morality, and one Guins cites regularly, is Fallout 3, a Bethesda Game Studios title released in 2008 to widespread critical acclaim.

“You’re literally born into the game,” Guins says, and his exclamation is not tainted with a single hint of overstatement. The beginning of the game allows the player to choose their character’s name, race and gender while he or she lies in the mother’s womb. Players can then develop their character’s core attributes through narrative devices, like reading a children’s book titled You’re SPECIAL to determine favored character traits like intelligence and charisma, and then taking an aptitude test at age 16 to single out core features of your character.

The game reaches a complexity of rare proportions when the player is let loose on a post-apocalyptic world at age 18, where no law exists beyond the player’s personal code and need to survive. When you find your first city, the decimated Megaton inhabited by citizens who worship a dormant nuclear bomb, you also approach one of the game’s oft-cited moral conundrums: detonate the bomb and wipe out the city or choose to live among its people. The decision holds such emotional magnitude that the choice was removed from the game’s Japanese version for sensitivity reasons.

Fallout 3’s moral complexity, enabled primarily through the flexibility of your character, is a far cry from the video game characters of decades past, and a polarizing example of how character development has been at the crux of morality-based video games.

After all, the earliest games involved a confined space inhabited by a character defined by its action. There was no choice other than to play the game or not, and nothing beyond that except to play the game well or poorly.

“You’re playing a creature, like Pac-Man or a human representation, the cartoony Mario,” Guins explains. “You don’t really have, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, any control over the customization factor. Basically you’re playing either a vehicle or a being—you can’t change what that person looks like, what its name is, what color your tank happens to be or your car happens to be.”

The shift from occupying a preexisting form or character that has been developed associated with actions to being able to control those actions in a form designed by the player gave new context to what you did in video games. “As more options are made available in terms of supporting choice, we follow up by wanting to have more choice in the context of being a player in that game,” Guins says.

He cites games like the narratively shallow yet developmentally influential BMX and urban brawling titles of the ‘90s, games that let you customize your rider or fighter for no other reason besides pure entertainment, as contributing titles in the evolution of the video game character. Today, titles like Fallout 3, and the colossally successful Mass Effect and Elder Scrolls series, have thousands of customizable options that don’t simply please an aesthetic need, but go even deeper. They materialize in our characters’ personalities, and affect interactions throughout the games’ entirety, including dialogue and narrative endings.

“We actually live in our games today,” Guins says, sitting back in his chair and matter-of-factly admitting the grip video games are capable of exerting. “When I come across a new game… I’m going to lose track of time, I’m going to lose track of myself.

“I think the more you’re brought into the game, if you’re asked to spend hours and hours in these games, we need to have things to do. And part of allowing us to spend time and to give us things to do, is to allow us to have a certain sense of agency in these spaces. Not just reacting to events, but actually being able to contemplate where, when and how we respond to certain events.”

A Second Chance

sit down in front of a new computer with a pang of guilt in my chest. The idea of playing One Chance a second time feels like artistic betrayal, as if the horrible choices I forced cancer researcher John Pilgrim to endure on my initial play-through were less real, less devastating. But for the sake of exploring the game’s depth, I press on.

This time around, I will be a family man above all else. I cycle through what I now recognize as necessities; my co-worker throws himself off the roof following the realization of our cancer treatment, and I cannot stop him. But I only go to the lab when necessary and opt to stay home with my family at every possible opportunity, resigning myself to a gentle and inevitable end in the company of those I care about most.

With only two days left, I am forced to the lab by way of the game’s ever-apparent invisible hand in the form of my pleading co-workers still placing their hope for humanity in a potential cure. But once I arrive, an enraged man blames me for the virus and thrusts forward with a knife. I manage to wrestle it from his hands, but cannot prevent him fleeing.

When I arrive home that night, my house is empty of light and sound. Blood seeps from my wife’s corpse in the living room, and my daughter lies lifeless in her bedroom. I enter the house’s final room to discover that the assailant from the lab, the murderer of my family, has hung himself. I go to work on my final day, and spend my last breathing moments slipping away on the floor of the laboratory.

I sit and stare at John Pilgrim’s corpse and contemplate this alternative, yet equally grisly, end and the increasingly morally ambiguous undercurrent One Chance is channeling. I am beginning to question whether I, as John Pilgrim, really am tasked with trying to find a cure, and how I could do so without letting my wife spiral toward depression.

The In-Game “You”

hen Chris Ferguson, a psychologist for the American Psychological Association, conducted a comprehensive study on the effects of violent video games on youths in June 2010, the results were not surprising. Video games, even the most violent, had no harmful effects on players beyond the aggravation of preexisting tendencies like hostility and an inability to control anger. Ferguson even compared them to peanut butter—reasonable and harmless for nearly everyone who eats it, given that average people don’t eat themselves to death.

But Ferguson admits that psychology hasn’t caught up to the complexity of the modern video game. “Because we’ve been so stuck on this issue on just violent content, we really haven’t asked sophisticated questions like, ‘Is all violent content the same?’” he says.

His question is one of many residing at the core of morality-based games because it seeks to question more than the barebones motives for our actions in these virtual worlds; it’s making us evaluate not just why we choose to act, say, violently or immoral in a situation, but also what that decision and the pattern it belongs to says about us as players.

Ferguson has his own opinions from the great lengths of time spent studying video game playing and constructing comprehensive surveys. “I think it would come down to trying to understand the different motivations people have for playing video games,” he admits. Ferguson himself tends to play the good guy. “I can never quite bring myself to be a jerk. I’m always trying to save the princess and do the right thing.”

Johnny Enea, a student at Long Island University and avid gamer, says that he cannot help but choose what he believes to be morally right in the context of a virtual dilemma. Bioshock, a 2007 first-person shooter so narratively complex that it successfully imagined an underwater dystopia run by Ayn Rand objectivism, asked players whether or not they would sacrifice the life of young girls in exchange for sucking a vital source of energy from their bodies. Enea discovered that he in fact could not. “I tried to insert myself in that situation, and found myself unable to compromise my moral principles, even if it is a virtual simulation of a fictional universe,” he said. “It seems kind of laughable, but I find myself often unable to commit a misdeed in those kinds of games as I don’t want my actions to reflect badly upon myself.”

“In most games that I play, I’m like a white knight,” admits Ian Schafer, a sophomore at Stony Brook University. “It’s kind of a compulsion. It will benefit you in a gameplay sense, like people will like you and you’ll be able to buy things for cheaper in the game and things like that, but it’s also the satisfaction of saving people…a hero-complex kind of thing.” Schafer played Fable, one of the first games to be massively marketed as hinging on a “good or evil” system, as good as he could possible could be, achieving 100 percent on the meter that aggregates your actions by the end of the game.

But as with any duality, there is always the other side. “What I think is interesting is that games reveal certain modes of behavior that we may not exhibit in our everyday lives, or anywhere else,” Guins says of the polarity.

Roman Levant, a senior at Stony Brook University, played Fable entirely differently. “I was a monster, people would just run screaming from me lest they be killed or their wives taken. I did monstrous things, unspeakable things,” Levant says with a laugh. “The reason being the escapism. I understand this is a game. I understand that there are no real-life consequences. I find that the behavior in video games is much, much different than in a real, social environment.”

Ferguson reinforces this notion that games are a way of exploring different sides of our personalities. “It serves as an exploration of our dark side, and it may be a very safe environment to explore this dark side,” he says.

Levant, and millions of other gamers, is proof that video games cannot force you to act realistically. If the power to choose whether or not one plays a game according to ones real-life moral codes always lies with the player, then a video game, no matter how complex the story is or how deep the tree of choice-making grows, will always be a playground of varying levels of seriousness.

“I think it’s really dangerous to say that we always perform morally in games in the way that we perform morally out of games,” Guins says. “I think these games allow us to occupy their spaces in radically different ways. And because we’re being asked to fork out 60 something dollars, we can approach these games through a plethora of different personalities.”

But some games, reared by developers with multiple iterations of a series to build upon, have discovered that a strong narrative may be the key to evoking realistic, strong and emotional connections to not just the plot of a game, but the characters and the actions associated with them. If a game can engross you to a never-before-seen level, then the sophistication of the player’s mentality could potentially rise to that of the game.

Tom Bissell, a pioneer in philosophical game critique and author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, describes the significance of a series called Mass Effect in a late chapter of his book. The merits of the series’ first two installments (the third is set for a Spring 2012 release) go on and on, from its high-production voice acting and groundbreaking physics engine to its inter-stellar travel and oceans-deep dialogue system.

But perhaps the series’ most compelling feature, and the one that sets Mass Effect into a class of its own with respect to video game morality, is that every decision you make as the main character in Mass Effect’s first installment carries over into the second by way of reading your saved file across titles. “It actually makes thing matter,” Lavanet says bluntly of Mass Effect, illustrating how the series crafted an entirely new sense of gravity when in came to choice making.

Bissell explains that although he knew his decisions would carry over, he made his central character, a male or female human (you get to choose) named Commander Shepherd, an undeniably immoral being with the intent of experimentation in mind. He would be as rude as possible in conversations, and always explore the extent of his freedom when making choice in an action context. But he had a revelation of sorts when he discovered that the game’s engrossing narrative and complex morality system ignited something new within him as a player.

“These games become equally compelling when they force you to edge of some drawn, real-life line of intellectual or moral obligation that, to your mild astonishment, you find you cannot step across even in what is, essentially, a digital dollhouse for adults,” Bissell writes. He is referring to a moment when he refused to let his character purchase a permit for an AI character that would effectively let it preach publicly about religion. “Other mediums may depict necessary (or foolhardy) breaches of such lines, or their foolhardy (or necessary) protection, but only games actually push you to the line’s edge and make you live with fictional consequences of your choice.”

Even Guins, who openly questions the idea of choice in games with unavoidably limited options and sees the idea of morality as pragmatic and possibly nothing else, admits to moments of transcendence. While playing Fallout 3, when Guins’ sidekick Faux died, he says he stumbled into a moment of profound loss.

“I realized what made that game fun for me was my partnership with this kind of AI character,” he says. “The conversations that Faux and I would have, the way that we would strategically plan our attacks against other super mutants, or to solve certain problems in the game—as soon as I lost that, the game didn’t have the same meaning to me.”

This type of transcendence—this emotional connection rooted in the difference between life and death, right and wrong, and everything in between—is the very reason video games are no longer questionably art, but artistic reflections of ourselves, our societies and the way we occupy, maneuver and make sense of those environments.

Bissell, in a gut-wrenchingly personal chapter of his book that was subsequently excerpted in The Guardian in March 2010, parallels his relationships with cocaine and the completely unhinged, morally ambiguous Grand Theft Auto IV, coming to the realization that “maybe all that a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough.”

Bissell’s realization strikes at the heart of the topic: that video games, no matter how violent they can be, or how narratively complex or simplified they are, or how openly they explore morality, do in fact illustrate facets of our personality in a way no other medium can. But the important thing to keep in mind is that while they do force us to hold a mirror to our sub-conscious, they also let us bend that reflection to our will.

In games, we are who we want to be, depending on the circumstance, contingent on the context and with as much real-world truth as we see fit. These expansive boundaries make the modern video game more a dynamic, moving snapshot of how we think, react to and evaluate a near-endless amount of situations and ideas. It also explains why it’s a medium that will keep continuously evolving as long as entertainment exists.

The Significance of Choice

begin my final play through of One Chance with a mission: I will find a cure. Not only do I feel like I am robbing the game of its creative capacity, but I am also running out of computers to use. I’m told of YouTube videos depicting the different endings, or of ways to get around the one-play mechanism by using other websites or clearing my browser’s cache. I ignore the workarounds for the sheer fact of maintaining what little integrity the game has allowed me to maintain and simply hop on my last available computer.

I decide to spend every possible moment I can at the lab, and go through the motions of the first few days. I am not fazed by the suicide, but still reminded of how starkly it arrested the tone and overall feel of the entire game the first time I played. I come to what I now recognize as a pivotal mid-game decision: to spend time with my family or stay at the lab now that the humanity-ending virus has spread. I must keep working.

My wife’s suicide comes as no surprise. Maybe it’s integral to the path of finding a cure. Maybe she, in the limited and shallow scope of the game’s plot, cannot handle the potential of human extinction, no matter what her husband does. John Pilgrim is starting to remind me of the empty shell you fill in Fallout 3, or Commander Shepard of Mass Effect who will live or die by the end of the series’ second installment depending on your choices.

Guins’ voice rings in my ears. “In the case of the game, if I choose the wrong option, my character may die.” I take my daughter to work with me on the final day, with the now-familiar gaunt filling my face. In the lab, I suddenly fill a needle with liquid and stick myself in the arm. The color returns to my face. Out in the hallway, I administer the cure to my daughter. The game ends with me sitting quietly on a bench in the park with my daughter. Everything and anything after that is up to my imagination.