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Comparing The Effect Of Moral Decisions in Games on the Player: Zero Time Dilemma versus Undertale
Comparing The Effect Of Moral Decisions in Games on the Player: Zero Time Dilemma versus Undertale
In recent years, many games have featured choice-based narrative in order to challenge the player with moral decisions. Decisions of whether to save characters or leave them are particularly common, but in many games such as Fire Emblem: Awakening, in which the player is presented with multiple moral decisions throughout the course of the story segments, a lot of these choices only affect the game very slightly or not at all. Out of the three major choices in Awakening, only one changes the game’s outcome in any remotely significant way, and the player is not asked to reflect on which option they choose. Plenty of games give players this illusion of free choice only to take it back a moment later, but games with genuine multiple outcomes to individual situations are also rising in popularity. Of these games, I would like to compare two; the first being Undertale, an indie game by developer Toby Fox, which describes itself as an RPG in which ‘you don’t have to kill anyone’. (Fox, 2016.) The other is Zero Time Dilemma, the third entry in the Zero Escape series by developer Kotaro Uchikoshi.
Zero Time Dilemma is considerably darker than Undertale, putting its nine main characters through the ‘Decision Game’, during which six of the nine major characters must die for any of the remaining characters to escape. Undertale’s adventure throughout the monster-filled Underground coupled with Earthbound-reminiscent graphics and overall optimistic message encourages the player to do their best, and its heavy focus on humour creates a light atmosphere. However, both games involve incorporating the player’s own feelings heavily, asking for their input to quite literally change the game’s outcomes as they play. Most decisions focus on the player’s morals and ethics, in some cases creating irreversible results, or scenarios that alter the flow of the game heavily. Although these two games both rely heavily on moral decisions to immerse the player, they both handle it in very different ways, which can potentially affect the player heavily. Do these games have a profound emotional effect on the player, or can the player disengage with them enough that its effects are negligible? If there is an effect on the player, which of the two has a stronger effect? These are the questions I would like to explore further, trying to determine more about the player’s experience while playing these two games.
Sicart wrote that when players are confronted with moral choices in games, ‘players take into consideration…what other players do and consider correct’. (Sicart, 2009.) It seems that this is an opinion shared by Fox, the creator of Undertale, who even goes so far as to taunt people watching playthrough videos of the game to avoid doing it themselves through his character Flowey’s dialogue in the No Mercy route; having him state that the player is better than ‘those pathetic people that want to see it, but are too weak to do it for themselves’. (Undertale, 2016.) This kind of dialogue proves that Undertale is very aware of its potential effect on the viewer and their morals, and brands them just as bad, if not worse, as those who commit morally questionable actions within the game world. However, Zero Time Dilemma takes quite an opposite approach; instead of guilting the player for an option they choose to take, it forces the player to see every possible outcome before they reach the game’s conclusion. Despite 23 of the game’s 32 endings being Game Overs where one or multiple characters die, the player is obligated to jump back to earlier points in the game purly to go back on their first decision, having to watch every potential gory death scene of the timeline before they are finally rewarded with the opportunity to reach the true ending.
It could be said that Zero Time Dilemma completely revokes the perceived care ethics the player has developed while they are immersed in the game world; although it has been stated that ’building and maintaining relationships is the motivator for ethical behaviour’ (Murphy & Zagal, 2011), Zero Time Dilemma’s very mechanics make it so that this is implausible; even the player does not know who has committed some murders due to the game’s fragment system, which involves the player hopping between scenes in non-chronological order until all possible outcomes are completed and the scenes’ stories run into one another. Not only this, but the fact that all of the characters have the potential to commit murder in different timelines means that it is very difficult for the player to keep track of which relationships are worth defending. On the other hand, Undertale reinforces these care ethics; the player is encouraged to treat the characters kindly, which causes the player to feel ‘a need to engage in ethical gameplay that takes into account his own personal values’. (Murphy & Zagal, 2011). In line with Zagal (2011)’s statement that ‘for videogames to create opportunities for meaningful ethical experiences, they must be designed in a way to allow the player’s own potential…to be explored’, Undertale encourages the player to form relationships with its characters; the best - though by no means only- outcome of the game requires the player to be friendly towards all characters. Since the option to exercise the player’s power over the monsters is always there, this game can be said to encourage ethical reflection - the player is not obligated to be kind, but must ask themselves whether it is acceptable in the game world or to fight and kill or not. It has been written that people often appear to at least attempt to respect social norms with computer-generated characters (Garau, Slater, Pertaub and Razzaque, 2005), so it should at least be assumed that the player would theoretically find it difficult to behave in ethically reprehensible ways. Conversely, it could be argued that Zero Time Dilemma does not give the player space to reflect on their own ethics; Although the player can make decisions, the fact that all of them are necessary to play before the player reaches the end implies that the true goal of the game is to play the story to completion, not ethical reflection. However, does the game’s dark content and the forced push of the player into ethically reprehensible decisions create an emotional response in the player?
In 2009, Zagal wrote that moral dilemmas in games ‘require the player to participate rather than simply spectate’, commenting that it is completely plausible for games to ‘make the player feel personally invested or responsible for the decisions that they make in the game’ (Zagal, 2009.) However, is the same true for decisions in which the player is obligated to act negatively? If there is no positive outcome to be responsible for, will players begin to feel proud of negative achievements, such as killing a character? It has been written that players who make in-game moral choices consistent with their own moral codes are likely to be more satisfied with themselves, and many players who are disengaged with the game tend to pick the more cruel outcome of moral dilemmas. (Shafer, 2012.) This was in line with Hartmann and Vorderer’s research, which also suggested that ‘the presence of moral disengagement cues may…diminish the pleasurable gratifications of virtual violence’. (Hartmann and Vorderer, 2010). This raises the question; if the player is not fully engaged with the game content, are they less likely to be impacted by the game’s interrogation of their moral systems?
Zero Time Dilemma features arguably only negative outcomes to any of its dilemmas. In one fragment of the game, the player must decide whether to make team leader Diana shoot a gun that has a 50% chance of firing a live bullet at another character, Sigma, or choose not to fire, which would cause fellow team member Phi’s death. The probability is rolled within the game, so there is no telling which outcome the player will cause if they decide to pull the trigger until after it is done. Montola described the concept of emotional bleed, specifically bleed out, when ‘games elicit responses in players that resemble those of their fictional characters’. (Montola, 2010). Montola’s research also found that players who had willingly played games with horrific content (the example game used being Gang Rape, an intentionally repulsive short scenario that forces players into being the worst they can be to encourage emotional bleed). In Zero Time Dilemma, where the characters are provoked by the player into committing decisions completely against their morals, emotional bleed can be high; if the player makes gentle nurse Diana shoot the gun and Sigma were to die as a result, the following scenario that plays involves Diana so stricken with guilt that she takes her own life, making the player feel at blame for picking a decision that kills two characters rather than one.
Undertale, too, utilises emotional bleed to make the player question their participation in the game; by utilising long-term, narrative-changing consequences to each major decision, the player feels guilty for doing things wrong, and proud of doing things right. At the end of a neutral run, the character of Sans will call the protagonist, and the details of his call will vary depending on who the player killed and didn’t kill. This reinforces the idea that the player’s actions had heavy effects on the game world while the player is not there; according to Murphy and Zagal, this ‘illusion of independent action … encourages emotional attachment and creates a desire to maintain relationships’ (Murphy & Zagal, 2011). which could serve as a reason why players typically replay Undertale multiple times in order to get the best possible ending. Considering it has been theorised that ‘spreading [blame] across several group members who share responsibility’ can count as a mechanism for moral disengagement (Shafer, 2012), Undertale could potentially be more effective at achieving emotional bleed in this regard; moral decisions in Zero Time Dilemma are not attributed to a single player, but are instead actions of the three team leaders simply guided by the player - the player can justify their behaviour in that it was technically a game character, not the player, that carried out the morally reprehensible action. On the contrary, Undertale’s decisions are all attributed to the protagonist - who the player controls, and who appears to take the player’s name - throughout the game. At the end of the game’s No Mercy route, it is revealed that another character who approaches the player at the end of the game (default name Chara) is the character the player named, rather than the character the player is led to believe they named, which would be the protagonist, Frisk. (For ease, I will refer to the character the player names as Chara from now on.) Chara is explicitly stated to not have been ‘the greatest person’ by Asriel, and will ask the protagonist to destroy the world with them at the end of the No Mercy run. Should the protagonist accept, they will indeed destroy the world together with Chara, and the protagonist must wait ten minutes in real-time before Chara asks them if they are ‘above consequences’ and agrees to restore the game world in exchange for the protagonist’s soul. However, this alters the game forever; the true Pacifist ending can no longer be reached. According to Shafer, ‘guilt can be absolved through distortion or disregard of consequences’, another moral disengagement mechanism; Undertale prevents the player from morally disengaging with the source material even on subsequent game runs by permanently altering the game’s ending, thus making the player permanently examine and reexamine their morals over and over; this provokes them to regret their own gameplay choices and asks them to think harder about their behaviour.
Both Undertale and Zero Time Dilemma could be said to be more of an experience trying to influence the player than a game existing purely for entertainment content due to their heavy focus on player inclusion and morals. The games hold a personal connection to the player due to the high levels of interactivity (Klimmt, 2009.) and therefore have more likelihood of affecting the player’s personal views. However, could it be possible for these games to influence the player’s morals negatively? It has been written that exposure to violent video games could increase the likelihood of aggressive behaviour (Anderson & Bushman, 2001). Following this line of thought, it can be argued that Zero Time Dilemma’s dark atmosphere and gruesome choices could provoke unethical behaviour in players. Conversely, Grizzard suggested that any experiences which elicit guilt in games could actually make the player more morally sensitive (Grizzard et al., 2014). Undertale seems to fit with Grizzard’s ideas; it consistently reprimands and guilts the player openly and obviously for picking violent or immoral decisions, in a way Zero Time Dilemma does not. Even though the player may feel bad due to their pre-existing set of morals, Zero Time Dilemma does not directly blame the player for any of its choices, although it does show the consequences of the player’s decision on the game’s characters.
It could be further argued that Zero Time Dilemma simply does not follow absolutist moral rules to the same extent as Undertale. Nichols and Mallon’s research showed that when confronted with a catastrophe situation in which a moral rule is broken in order to save lives in the long run, ‘sixty-eight percent of participants said that the actor broke a moral rule, but only 24% said that the action was…the wrong thing to do’ (Nichols & Mallon, 2005). Although Zero Time Dilemma consistently forces its players break moral rules, the characters are consistently faced with moral decisions in which they try to take the option that minimises casualties, much like the hypothetical examples in Nichols and Mallon’s 2005 research; this is possibly best epitomised by the antagonist of Zero Time Dilemma, who is set on causing the deaths of billions by releasing the airborne virus Radical-6, which has a 75% mortality rate. The player finds out that he is doing so in order to have a 75% chance of causing the death of an anonymous terrorist who, in the future, would supposedly cause the end of humanity by starting a nuclear war; these kinds of situations where one outcome is only marginally better than the other are frequent throughout the game. Undertale, on the other hand, requires the player’s moral choices to be perfect before they are rewarded with the Pacifist ending; fighting and defeating even one enemy rather than sparing them all will result in a Neutral ending rather than the desired Pacifist. Compared to Undertale, which shows consequences and reprimands the player consistently, Zero Time Dilemma’s inconsistent reactions to player decision is simply not as effective at making sure the player retains moral sensitivity throughout their immersion in the game. However, it still stands that Zero Time Dilemma does not reprimand its players openly enough to maintain player moral sensitivity according to Grizzard’s ideas. In this way, although the specific subset of morals the two games deal with are different, it could be said that Zero Time Dilemma is much more likely to have a strong negative effect on the player’s morals than Undertale.
In conclusion, it is quite difficult to compare the morals and the effect of the morals displayed in these two games. Although both feature heavy moral commentary, it is dealt with in almost opposite ways. Where Zero Time Dilemma does not guilt the player, Undertale reprimands them for their actions; where Zero Time Dilemma walks back over the concept of care ethics, Undertale reinforces it; and where Zero Time Dilemma deals with more abstract, imperfect moral decisions, Undertale pushes the absolute, forcing the player to reflect until they are able to act morally perfectly instead of weigh up two bad situations to find the lesser of two evils. Potentially the greatest similarity between the two games is that they both utilise emotional bleed between the player and characters in order to drive their morals home. Undertale’s Pacifist run’s emotional finale, coupled with the end credits scene showing all the in-game characters enjoying their new lives, encourages the player to reflect not on what they have done wrong, but what they have done right; it allows the player to see the effects of their hard work and encourages them to continue reflecting on their actions outside of the game world. Perhaps surprisingly, even the bleak, confusing slaughterhouse of Zero Time Dilemma asks the user to reflect occasionally. In the game, a mechanism called SHIFTing allows characters to swap their consciousness with copies of themselves in another timeline, and an extensive discussion takes place at the finale of the game, where the nine characters who have experienced all of the moral decisions throughout the game are backed into a corner and presented with the opportunity to SHIFT with another timeline’s copy of themselves who never experienced such a thing; in this case, the choice that will grant you the game’s true ending would be to swap consciousnesses, condemning the alternate copies of the characters to a death they don’t understand while letting the characters who have experienced and learned survive. However, because they have experienced the absolute despair of the events in the game, it allows them to move on as better people in order to help the world as a whole in the future they earned; this admittedly confusing ending scenario could also be taken as a self-criticism of the game’s ethically questionable choices, requesting the player to treat the game itself as an experience, and despite knowing that they are capable of becoming cruel within the context of the game, to aim to become more morally sensitive in lieu of their in-game activities.
In recent years, many games have featured choice-based narrative in order to challenge the player with moral decisions. Decisions of whether to save characters or leave them are particularly common, but in many games such as Fire Emblem: Awakening, in which the player is presented with multiple moral decisions throughout the course of the story segments, a lot of these choices only affect the game very slightly or not at all. Out of the three major choices in Awakening, only one changes the game’s outcome in any remotely significant way, and the player is not asked to reflect on which option they choose. Plenty of games give players this illusion of free choice only to take it back a moment later, but games with genuine multiple outcomes to individual situations are also rising in popularity. Of these games, I would like to compare two; the first being Undertale, an indie game by developer Toby Fox, which describes itself as an RPG in which ‘you don’t have to kill anyone’. (Fox, 2016.) The other is Zero Time Dilemma, the third entry in the Zero Escape series by developer Kotaro Uchikoshi.
Zero Time Dilemma is considerably darker than Undertale, putting its nine main characters through the ‘Decision Game’, during which six of the nine major characters must die for any of the remaining characters to escape. Undertale’s adventure throughout the monster-filled Underground coupled with Earthbound-reminiscent graphics and overall optimistic message encourages the player to do their best, and its heavy focus on humour creates a light atmosphere. However, both games involve incorporating the player’s own feelings heavily, asking for their input to quite literally change the game’s outcomes as they play. Most decisions focus on the player’s morals and ethics, in some cases creating irreversible results, or scenarios that alter the flow of the game heavily. Although these two games both rely heavily on moral decisions to immerse the player, they both handle it in very different ways, which can potentially affect the player heavily. Do these games have a profound emotional effect on the player, or can the player disengage with them enough that its effects are negligible? If there is an effect on the player, which of the two has a stronger effect? These are the questions I would like to explore further, trying to determine more about the player’s experience while playing these two games.
Sicart wrote that when players are confronted with moral choices in games, ‘players take into consideration…what other players do and consider correct’. (Sicart, 2009.) It seems that this is an opinion shared by Fox, the creator of Undertale, who even goes so far as to taunt people watching playthrough videos of the game to avoid doing it themselves through his character Flowey’s dialogue in the No Mercy route; having him state that the player is better than ‘those pathetic people that want to see it, but are too weak to do it for themselves’. (Undertale, 2016.) This kind of dialogue proves that Undertale is very aware of its potential effect on the viewer and their morals, and brands them just as bad, if not worse, as those who commit morally questionable actions within the game world. However, Zero Time Dilemma takes quite an opposite approach; instead of guilting the player for an option they choose to take, it forces the player to see every possible outcome before they reach the game’s conclusion. Despite 23 of the game’s 32 endings being Game Overs where one or multiple characters die, the player is obligated to jump back to earlier points in the game purly to go back on their first decision, having to watch every potential gory death scene of the timeline before they are finally rewarded with the opportunity to reach the true ending.
It could be said that Zero Time Dilemma completely revokes the perceived care ethics the player has developed while they are immersed in the game world; although it has been stated that ’building and maintaining relationships is the motivator for ethical behaviour’ (Murphy & Zagal, 2011), Zero Time Dilemma’s very mechanics make it so that this is implausible; even the player does not know who has committed some murders due to the game’s fragment system, which involves the player hopping between scenes in non-chronological order until all possible outcomes are completed and the scenes’ stories run into one another. Not only this, but the fact that all of the characters have the potential to commit murder in different timelines means that it is very difficult for the player to keep track of which relationships are worth defending. On the other hand, Undertale reinforces these care ethics; the player is encouraged to treat the characters kindly, which causes the player to feel ‘a need to engage in ethical gameplay that takes into account his own personal values’. (Murphy & Zagal, 2011). In line with Zagal (2011)’s statement that ‘for videogames to create opportunities for meaningful ethical experiences, they must be designed in a way to allow the player’s own potential…to be explored’, Undertale encourages the player to form relationships with its characters; the best - though by no means only- outcome of the game requires the player to be friendly towards all characters. Since the option to exercise the player’s power over the monsters is always there, this game can be said to encourage ethical reflection - the player is not obligated to be kind, but must ask themselves whether it is acceptable in the game world or to fight and kill or not. It has been written that people often appear to at least attempt to respect social norms with computer-generated characters (Garau, Slater, Pertaub and Razzaque, 2005), so it should at least be assumed that the player would theoretically find it difficult to behave in ethically reprehensible ways. Conversely, it could be argued that Zero Time Dilemma does not give the player space to reflect on their own ethics; Although the player can make decisions, the fact that all of them are necessary to play before the player reaches the end implies that the true goal of the game is to play the story to completion, not ethical reflection. However, does the game’s dark content and the forced push of the player into ethically reprehensible decisions create an emotional response in the player?
In 2009, Zagal wrote that moral dilemmas in games ‘require the player to participate rather than simply spectate’, commenting that it is completely plausible for games to ‘make the player feel personally invested or responsible for the decisions that they make in the game’ (Zagal, 2009.) However, is the same true for decisions in which the player is obligated to act negatively? If there is no positive outcome to be responsible for, will players begin to feel proud of negative achievements, such as killing a character? It has been written that players who make in-game moral choices consistent with their own moral codes are likely to be more satisfied with themselves, and many players who are disengaged with the game tend to pick the more cruel outcome of moral dilemmas. (Shafer, 2012.) This was in line with Hartmann and Vorderer’s research, which also suggested that ‘the presence of moral disengagement cues may…diminish the pleasurable gratifications of virtual violence’. (Hartmann and Vorderer, 2010). This raises the question; if the player is not fully engaged with the game content, are they less likely to be impacted by the game’s interrogation of their moral systems?
Zero Time Dilemma features arguably only negative outcomes to any of its dilemmas. In one fragment of the game, the player must decide whether to make team leader Diana shoot a gun that has a 50% chance of firing a live bullet at another character, Sigma, or choose not to fire, which would cause fellow team member Phi’s death. The probability is rolled within the game, so there is no telling which outcome the player will cause if they decide to pull the trigger until after it is done. Montola described the concept of emotional bleed, specifically bleed out, when ‘games elicit responses in players that resemble those of their fictional characters’. (Montola, 2010). Montola’s research also found that players who had willingly played games with horrific content (the example game used being Gang Rape, an intentionally repulsive short scenario that forces players into being the worst they can be to encourage emotional bleed). In Zero Time Dilemma, where the characters are provoked by the player into committing decisions completely against their morals, emotional bleed can be high; if the player makes gentle nurse Diana shoot the gun and Sigma were to die as a result, the following scenario that plays involves Diana so stricken with guilt that she takes her own life, making the player feel at blame for picking a decision that kills two characters rather than one.
Undertale, too, utilises emotional bleed to make the player question their participation in the game; by utilising long-term, narrative-changing consequences to each major decision, the player feels guilty for doing things wrong, and proud of doing things right. At the end of a neutral run, the character of Sans will call the protagonist, and the details of his call will vary depending on who the player killed and didn’t kill. This reinforces the idea that the player’s actions had heavy effects on the game world while the player is not there; according to Murphy and Zagal, this ‘illusion of independent action … encourages emotional attachment and creates a desire to maintain relationships’ (Murphy & Zagal, 2011). which could serve as a reason why players typically replay Undertale multiple times in order to get the best possible ending. Considering it has been theorised that ‘spreading [blame] across several group members who share responsibility’ can count as a mechanism for moral disengagement (Shafer, 2012), Undertale could potentially be more effective at achieving emotional bleed in this regard; moral decisions in Zero Time Dilemma are not attributed to a single player, but are instead actions of the three team leaders simply guided by the player - the player can justify their behaviour in that it was technically a game character, not the player, that carried out the morally reprehensible action. On the contrary, Undertale’s decisions are all attributed to the protagonist - who the player controls, and who appears to take the player’s name - throughout the game. At the end of the game’s No Mercy route, it is revealed that another character who approaches the player at the end of the game (default name Chara) is the character the player named, rather than the character the player is led to believe they named, which would be the protagonist, Frisk. (For ease, I will refer to the character the player names as Chara from now on.) Chara is explicitly stated to not have been ‘the greatest person’ by Asriel, and will ask the protagonist to destroy the world with them at the end of the No Mercy run. Should the protagonist accept, they will indeed destroy the world together with Chara, and the protagonist must wait ten minutes in real-time before Chara asks them if they are ‘above consequences’ and agrees to restore the game world in exchange for the protagonist’s soul. However, this alters the game forever; the true Pacifist ending can no longer be reached. According to Shafer, ‘guilt can be absolved through distortion or disregard of consequences’, another moral disengagement mechanism; Undertale prevents the player from morally disengaging with the source material even on subsequent game runs by permanently altering the game’s ending, thus making the player permanently examine and reexamine their morals over and over; this provokes them to regret their own gameplay choices and asks them to think harder about their behaviour.
Both Undertale and Zero Time Dilemma could be said to be more of an experience trying to influence the player than a game existing purely for entertainment content due to their heavy focus on player inclusion and morals. The games hold a personal connection to the player due to the high levels of interactivity (Klimmt, 2009.) and therefore have more likelihood of affecting the player’s personal views. However, could it be possible for these games to influence the player’s morals negatively? It has been written that exposure to violent video games could increase the likelihood of aggressive behaviour (Anderson & Bushman, 2001). Following this line of thought, it can be argued that Zero Time Dilemma’s dark atmosphere and gruesome choices could provoke unethical behaviour in players. Conversely, Grizzard suggested that any experiences which elicit guilt in games could actually make the player more morally sensitive (Grizzard et al., 2014). Undertale seems to fit with Grizzard’s ideas; it consistently reprimands and guilts the player openly and obviously for picking violent or immoral decisions, in a way Zero Time Dilemma does not. Even though the player may feel bad due to their pre-existing set of morals, Zero Time Dilemma does not directly blame the player for any of its choices, although it does show the consequences of the player’s decision on the game’s characters.
It could be further argued that Zero Time Dilemma simply does not follow absolutist moral rules to the same extent as Undertale. Nichols and Mallon’s research showed that when confronted with a catastrophe situation in which a moral rule is broken in order to save lives in the long run, ‘sixty-eight percent of participants said that the actor broke a moral rule, but only 24% said that the action was…the wrong thing to do’ (Nichols & Mallon, 2005). Although Zero Time Dilemma consistently forces its players break moral rules, the characters are consistently faced with moral decisions in which they try to take the option that minimises casualties, much like the hypothetical examples in Nichols and Mallon’s 2005 research; this is possibly best epitomised by the antagonist of Zero Time Dilemma, who is set on causing the deaths of billions by releasing the airborne virus Radical-6, which has a 75% mortality rate. The player finds out that he is doing so in order to have a 75% chance of causing the death of an anonymous terrorist who, in the future, would supposedly cause the end of humanity by starting a nuclear war; these kinds of situations where one outcome is only marginally better than the other are frequent throughout the game. Undertale, on the other hand, requires the player’s moral choices to be perfect before they are rewarded with the Pacifist ending; fighting and defeating even one enemy rather than sparing them all will result in a Neutral ending rather than the desired Pacifist. Compared to Undertale, which shows consequences and reprimands the player consistently, Zero Time Dilemma’s inconsistent reactions to player decision is simply not as effective at making sure the player retains moral sensitivity throughout their immersion in the game. However, it still stands that Zero Time Dilemma does not reprimand its players openly enough to maintain player moral sensitivity according to Grizzard’s ideas. In this way, although the specific subset of morals the two games deal with are different, it could be said that Zero Time Dilemma is much more likely to have a strong negative effect on the player’s morals than Undertale.
In conclusion, it is quite difficult to compare the morals and the effect of the morals displayed in these two games. Although both feature heavy moral commentary, it is dealt with in almost opposite ways. Where Zero Time Dilemma does not guilt the player, Undertale reprimands them for their actions; where Zero Time Dilemma walks back over the concept of care ethics, Undertale reinforces it; and where Zero Time Dilemma deals with more abstract, imperfect moral decisions, Undertale pushes the absolute, forcing the player to reflect until they are able to act morally perfectly instead of weigh up two bad situations to find the lesser of two evils. Potentially the greatest similarity between the two games is that they both utilise emotional bleed between the player and characters in order to drive their morals home. Undertale’s Pacifist run’s emotional finale, coupled with the end credits scene showing all the in-game characters enjoying their new lives, encourages the player to reflect not on what they have done wrong, but what they have done right; it allows the player to see the effects of their hard work and encourages them to continue reflecting on their actions outside of the game world. Perhaps surprisingly, even the bleak, confusing slaughterhouse of Zero Time Dilemma asks the user to reflect occasionally. In the game, a mechanism called SHIFTing allows characters to swap their consciousness with copies of themselves in another timeline, and an extensive discussion takes place at the finale of the game, where the nine characters who have experienced all of the moral decisions throughout the game are backed into a corner and presented with the opportunity to SHIFT with another timeline’s copy of themselves who never experienced such a thing; in this case, the choice that will grant you the game’s true ending would be to swap consciousnesses, condemning the alternate copies of the characters to a death they don’t understand while letting the characters who have experienced and learned survive. However, because they have experienced the absolute despair of the events in the game, it allows them to move on as better people in order to help the world as a whole in the future they earned; this admittedly confusing ending scenario could also be taken as a self-criticism of the game’s ethically questionable choices, requesting the player to treat the game itself as an experience, and despite knowing that they are capable of becoming cruel within the context of the game, to aim to become more morally sensitive in lieu of their in-game activities.
References
Anderson, C. and Bushman, B. (2001). EFFECTS OF VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES ON AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR, AGGRESSIVE COGNITION, AGGRESSIVE AFFECT, PHYSIOLOGICAL AROUSAL, AND PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Scientific Literature. 1st ed. Available at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-9280.00366
Fox, T. (2015). Undertale, video game.
Fox, T. (2015). UNDERTALE. [online] Available at: http://undertale.com/ [Accessed 7 Feb. 2017].
Garau, M., Slater, M., Pertaub, D. and Razzaque, S. (2005). PRESENCE: VOLUME 14, The Responses of People to Virtual Humans in an Immersive Virtual Environment. 1st ed. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, p.114. Available at: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/
Grizzard, M. (2014). Being Bad in a Video Game Can Make Us Morally Sensitive. [online] ResearchGate. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263296879_Being_Bad_in_a_Video_Game_Can_Make_Us_Morally_Sensitive
Hartmann, T. and Vorderer, P. (2010). It's Okay to Shoot a Character: Moral Disengagement in Violent Video Games. [online] Available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2009.01459.x/abstract [Accessed 14 Feb. 2017].
Klimmt, C. (2009). Serious Games and Social Change. 1st ed. Routledge, p.Serious Games: Mechanisms and Effects, 249 onwards.
Montola, M. (2010). The Positive Negative Experience in Extreme Role-Playing. Available at: http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/10343.56524.pdf
Murphy, J. and Zagal, J. (2011). Videogames and the Ethics of Care. 1st ed. International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, p.71.
Nichols, S. and Mallon, R. (2005). Moral Decisions and Moral Rules. [online] Available at: http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~snichols/Papers/Moral_dilemmas_and_maoral_rules.pdf
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