In an effort to make better moral choices in games, I've spent some time doing research on morality. I found two good books that helped me, and I'd like to share them.
The first book is The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. In his book, he writes about how we evolved as moral creatures and defines morality in a graduated scale. The somewhat controversial stance states that we can actually measure morality in a objective manner, rather than the typically subjective way people define morals within individual societies. The key premise that struck me was how you could get this measurement. He begins by posing that a moral society is a measure of the amount of human suffering that occurs within it. The worst state of morality would be a society that creates the most amount of suffering for the maximum amount of it's populace. From there, you have societies that create less suffering for an increasingly larger set of the population. These creates a series of peaks and valleys of societies that are more or less moral.
The second book is Moral Minds by Marc Houser. This book focuses on how we make choices on moral issues. This makes it especially interesting as the psychology can be directly applied to how you can predict players will behave. One of the more interesting aspects of the book discusses how politics is an extention of our morality. The two main stances discussed include the authoritarian (conservative) and anti-establishment (liberal) members of society. I found it interesting how the authoritarian approach has an inherent advantage, given that our minds evolved in a world where we listen to our parents to avoid dangers in prehistory.
A couple of ideas that came from this research:
Moral choices should impact the experience in an expected way, but still surprise the player.
Moral choices are more interesting when there is not a clear definition of good and evil choice.
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