abstract
| - Some games employ a type of morality in their gameplay. Actions taken within the game affect the player, and sometimes how the player is treated by the plot and NPC. This happens even if there were no witnesses to the action and no circumstances that point to you. Some games will make it impossible for one to continue if their Karma Meter is too low, or give a bad ending. Others will simply result in the character having an "evil alignment" and playing this way. In some games, it doesn't matter whether you're good or bad but how far you lean to one side is rewarded -- there are bonuses for being very good or very evil but not moderate. This has the annoying side effect of rewarding if not forcing the doing of completely pointless acts of malice, killing beggars and robbing empty houses just to be "more evil", and punishing an evil player for doing good quests or deeds (depending on how harsh the meter is) and vice versa, stifling real choices altogether. To undermine the concept even further, games with a Karma Meter often include a Golden Snitch decision that will heavily push you towards (or even lock you permanently in) one extreme of the morality gauge regardless of your actions up to that point. This means that in a game with Multiple Endings, your ending is decided more by that one single choice rather than an accumulation of all of your deeds and misdeeds. Except for the Golden Snitch event, typically no act is more than three or five times more evil or good than any other. This leads to the odd situation where a character with a perfect record of finding lost pets and helping old ladies with their groceries can bludgeon a school bus of Girl Scouts to death and pour napalm on their corpses while singing hymns to Satan and scarfing down a stack of Kitten Burgers and at worst go from "saintly" to "very good" on the Karma Meter. And unless the Karma changes are limited to plot events, go right back to "saintly" by killing some monsters or giving money to beggars. Occasionally the Karma Meter isn't visible in the stats screen, making it difficult to assess grayer actions. May be paired with Video Game Caring Potential and/or Video Game Cruelty Potential, making players more inclined to select one side. Compare Relationship Values and Alliance Meter. See also Character Alignment, Sanity Meter, Last Second Karma Choice and Hundred-Percent Heroism Rating. Examples of Karma Meter include:
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