The Worth of Morality: Fallout New Vegas

(The following article contains major spoilers for Fallout: New Vegas, but the game's plot isn't really founded on any major twists or surprises either.)
Games judging your morality usually gets negative reception from critics, at least the in recent years. Complex moral choices obviously can't be just represented by numbers on a binary scale, life does not play on clearly calculated rules. Yet, video games -- especially RPGs -- want players to feel their choices matter and their personality is represented in the game world, so they don't exactly stop trying either. The two approaches which are frequently used to achieve a morality system seem to be:

• The game presents complex moral choices but developers decide what's the better choice beforehand anyways and guides the player into following that.
• Give the player basic enough choices that good and evil can be easily separated.

This happens when developers don't actually think enough about a situation and assume abstract rules are good enough to make ethical choices or they face the limitation of the numerical morality system and can't think any way to get past it. For example, many games have blanket "stealing is bad" rule. It doesn't matter why you steal and whom you steal from, it is bad and you can't ever be a truly good character. This points to two things. Either, developers themselves hold such a view thus think it is actually a basic moral choice-- which is common -- or computer indeed needs predetermined rules to calculate a score. Both can be easily seen in "killing people is bad" rule which is filled with a lot of exceptions but those exceptions still needs to be predetermined and handpicked by developers, which means they have to enforce their own answers to questions which has supposed to be no easy answers.
There is nothing wrong with developers having opinions and desiring to represent them by itself. However,  if they actually want to give "there are no truly good or evil options, you win something by losing something else" fell into choices they create, then they should commit to that, which usually is best solved by just not having a morality system at all. Shin Megami Tensei is very good at this: Any time the endless struggle between Law and Chaos results in an apocalypse, the player is made to choose. You can bring absolute order, you can destroy all order in the universe or you can restore the universe back into what it was and let humanity and the eternal struggle continue. The game doesn't tell or even hit whether you are doing anything good or wrong. It's just your choices.
There is also a wrong way to achieve complexity however. If you make the choices too similar when attempting to gray them out,  they just end up being equally bad choices with almost purely aesthetic changes. Like in Skyrim, (I really can't escape Skyrim in these articles...) you can choose between Racist Blue Team and Imperialistic Red Team and the war only will end up make the realm weaker. It's all "grim and so complex.", right? No, if anything you do makes no tangential difference, then it is the opposite of player agency. If every option is absolute failure, then what you have is not a tough choice but mere helplessness.
This is why I have come to enjoy the second option much more, even though"black and white morality" is usually found immature and unrealistic. Bioshock for instance is sometimes critiqued as a low-effort attempt at giving player a choice. "You want to save the kids or kill them for power, what a 'heavy' choice, haha?" so the usual criticism goes. But, I can't ever think why this is really an issue. Video game marketing and focus-groups acting like basic moral choices are deep, complex or original is actually an issue, but giving basic choices itself is not and it can be done right. In Bioshock, saving the kids is great, not only for catharsis of doing the good thing but also it is an expression of your humanity. Conversely, killing kids just shows you are indeed an enslaved beast; it is not just a moral choice, you really determine who you are in that game. A basic morality system can be more impactful than "You helped 5 people and have 100 Goodness points. You are a hero!"
I don't believe every single choice in life is so complex either, sometimes things really boil down to binary choices. "Should we resist the people who are fundamentally against the existence of certain minorities?" or "Should people die of preventable diseases because they don't have enough money?" are not complex questions, despite what anyone tries to sell these as "tough realities of life". As basic as Fallout 3 gets with its "Should you nuke a town or not?" question for example, I much rather have it that way over a "Well, actually, you can't really know if using mass destruction weapons are bad?" or "Sure, you might nuke a town but you were also nice to some people so that makes a complex gray character."  nonsense. There is nothing insightful about being indecisive in the face of clear injustice, nothing challenging or new about equating tyranny of oppressors and the resistance of the oppressed, nothing gray about the worst monsters in the world being presentable, "loving" and "respectable". These narratives existed in both in fiction and real world long enough, and frankly no one needs them anymore. People rightfully mock how much mileage Blizzard gets out of "this character does a little genocide" plot point as to make characters "gray"er, but it gets less funnier when you see the same mentality in media talking about John McCain, the most recent example at the time of writing this.

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Curiously, Fallout: New Vegas attempts at both a complex and a simplistic morality systems and becomes succesful at both. For more complex decisions with greater impact, the game doesn't try to judge your morality directly and instead lets the player express themselves in a multidimensional Reputation system, where your actions are supported or opposed by factions of actually different ideologies. For smaller acts, there is a linear-scaling Karma system, where things like killing dangerous monsters and rejecting money as a reward of certain quests pull you towards Good while basically being a thief, bully or randomly murdering innocent people pulls you towards Bad. At first glance, Karma system seems unneccessary, its effect on game is mostly minimal -- which makes sense as a strange cannot know about your ethics or your random decision on an encounter -- and a far more complex system already exists.
However, the way Reputation and Karma interact in the endings is quite brilliant and adds to the game a lot. In this way, the Karma stops being a number of morality and but instead indicate a general reputation and legacy of PC. It becomes doubly meaningful with the fact that the game does put a "Everything is equal and so gray" narrative. While it gives a few POVs where Caesar's Legion can be seen anything other than monsters, the game does not shy away from treating them like fascists they are. You can get the ending where the Legion is victorious and it is clear that it is a really bad time for super-majority of people, but the real interesting part comes with Karma. You can have Good Karma, which means the Legion's worst excesses will be trimmed down a little and it can put a more respectable face. The game doesn't say you are a good person, it just acknowledges you might have some noble purposes for the path you have chosen and your moderate approach makes things a little better but doesn't pat you in the back for that. You still did something that hurt and will hurt countless amount of people. And if you have Bad Karma while supporting the Legion, you basically are a hell spawn. It is actually kind of uncommon where a game allows you to become an evil incarnate and also making it feel that dramatic.
Mr. House endings are just as interesting. He is a genius CEO, who has a bright mind, high ambitions for the humanity, a high opinion of himself and low opinion of most other people. In his endings, you basically become his right-hand. You can become one with sincerely good ideals about science and the advancement of humanity, but it won't still change that New Vegas will shine at the expense of poverty in rest of Mojave, a lot of good people will suffer in Mr. House's ruthless authoritarian pursuit of his utopia. The Bad Karma on the other hand allows you a heartless prick who enjoys the wealth of his empire.
The NCR endings are where things get grayer. New Californian Republic is a replication of old USA. It has founded with good intentions, has many supporters who are genuinely good people, they bring security to land and a lot of NCR soldiers are just there to fight an existential threat. It gets a fair deal of sympathetic portrayal but also gets a lot of criticism, especially if you listen the right people. It has standard liberal ideals of statecraft, law and order. As soon as it gained actual power though, it has already started to replicate the mistakes of USA; rampant corruption, expansionist policies, burdening taxes that only gets spend in said expansionist policies, re-introducing prisons on Mojave... NCR ending's will bring stability but it also bring old problems back. If you have Good Karma, you can be someone who is genuinely heroic and believer of peace and prosperity, but with Bad Karma, it shows that the system of NCR allows cruel people like you to be powerful.
The Independent ending is also very impactful. Basically, you allow no faction to take over Mojave, it will remain stateless. If you have Good Karma and also have good Reputation with various small factions, you can still bring peace and defend Mojave from outside threats, while believing in freedom as the highest value. The Bad Karma allows you to be someone who just hates most people besides themself, rendering Mojave in a perpetual state of chaos.
In some specific moments, Karma system is even more effective. In all endings besides Mr. House one, you must kill him, or leave him to die very slowly. For this act, rhe game gives you negative Karma, regardless of method you choose. What the game is judging here? Your contempt for his deals? Your lust of power? Your cruelty? Your personal dislike of Mr. House? You can mean all that when killing him but what the game primarily cares there is simply your will to get your hands dirty for your goals. There are very good reasons to think Mr. House as a despicable man, but what you did is still killing someone who was on life support. It can be righteous but it isn't innocent, nice or conventionally heroic. This instance really stands out as a moment where the game uses a basic score system to successfully reflect a complex situation.
The only area where Karma system fails at is Neutral options. In all endings, you basically become a gun for hire who only looks after for themself. If you play the game long enough, it is actually difficult to maintain a Neutral score, you have to do weird stuff. It resembles fail "gray characters" I complained about, you do some nice things but also steal from them for getting rich or kill some innocent people for no reason. But, the thing really bothers me is the implication being a gun for hire or only caring about yourself has no ethical issues or consequences surrounds it. It's a shame that a mature game like F:NV didn't actually explore those and relied on old D&D alignment-archetype. Honestly I also can't blame them for having a neutral score too much in the end, your Karma changing to Good to Bad in a single point wouldn't be good.
Video games, like all other mediums have limitations and need to work around them. A major one is the need of representing everything in the game world as numbers. Some concepts are just too vague for that, like morality. But a good game can create systems that hints at vague concepts rather than trying to represent them directly.
This article is written thanks to my dearest Patrons and special thanks to: Acelin, Alexandra Morgan, Laura Watson and Spencer Gill.