Okay, so I was playing through Fable 3 the other day, and I got to the point where I'm the ruler of this entire country. To get to be the leader of the rebellion, by the way, you have to make a bunch of promises to people to improve situations in the country. However, when you become ruler, you find out that in exactly one year, your nation will be attacked by a terrible, unstoppable force of darkness, and there's nothing you can do to prevent it. Upon hearing this you are given two choices that occur frequently throughout the remainder of the game: do you keep your promises and make the nation a better place, even though this will leave you completely open to attack and will increase casualties? Or do you become a tyrannical dictator and impose harsh rules upon your people, harsh rules that will end up protecting them in the end?
That's a unique feature that I actually quite like--providing realistic choices that actually reflect what usually happens in life. Normally, in games like these, your decisions are based solely on the basis that this action is good whereas this action is bad (e.g., Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect). In these games, the concept of having two possible choices is interesting, but it doesn't go much farther than that. Unless, of course, you're playing Mass Effect, in which case, your choices actually affect gameplay in sequels.
My point, though, is this--in games like these, the choices are usually very shallow. There's not much to them. For instance, in Knights of the Old Republic, you get to choose at the end whether to save Darth Malak or to kill him, wherein killing him is the evil decision. Of course, the argument that killing him is actually good because he deserves justice and that leaving him alive would be an error of judgement goes completely out the window, because *cue Leonidas voice* THIS! IS! AVIDEOGAME!!!!!
However, in Fable 3, there's actually another level to "good" and "bad" choices. By being a tyrant, you're actually protecting your people, but by being a benevolent leader, you're actually causing more harm in the end. It's interesting, because that's how a lot of life choices are like. True, you may not be making decisions that affect the future of an entire nation, but choices on any level can still carry more weight than simply "is someone going to like what I do?". For example, if your kid does something wrong, they're not going to like it if you punish them. But punishing them will teach them (hopefully) that doing bad things is wrong, a principle that, though simple it may seem, will stay with them for their whole life.
So, in other words, don't base your morality on whether or not it's approved of by other people. Because that's how we got into this mess in the first place.
A reminder--if you have any topics that you think might make an interesting devotional/thingy blog, please don't hesitate to leave them in the comments! I'd love to get some feedback from anybody reading this!
Until next time,
--CommanderSnowball
Hmmmm...the lesser of two evils. Something we don't tend to talk about in Sunday School. Leave it to video games to expose us to this moral conundrum!
ReplyDeleteWhat's funny is that Fable was made by Lionhead Studios, the company that made "Black and White", a game that placed you as a god in charge of a nation. So we go from you have ultimate authority to "with great power comes great responsibility"? Hmmm...
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