These are cute, conversational videos dealing with issues discussed in game studies.
The moral choices video reflects the complicated nature of the design problem. It also reminds me of an article, and something I wrote based off the article(but not going to pimp myself).
This is the original article:
http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/impact/myths.html
It's myth #6 that made me think of good and evil in games. The point that good is often not as fun or rewarding as evil is something I've repeatedly noticed.
Many early games were little more than shooting galleries where players were encouraged to blast everything that moved. Many current games are designed to be ethical testing grounds. They allow players to navigate an expansive and open-ended world, make their own choices and witness their consequences. The Sims designer Will Wright argues that games are perhaps the only medium that allows us to experience guilt over the actions of fictional characters. In a movie, one can always pull back and condemn the character or the artist when they cross certain social boundaries. But in playing a game, we choose what happens to the characters. In the right circumstances, we can be encouraged to examine our own values by seeing how we behave within virtual space.
Games are adding ethical choices, and I agree games can perhaps better convey guilt over actions more-so than other media, but I do not think we're anywhere near there yet as having achieved that conveying of guilt. Rockstar's games have messed around with this. RDR does far better with this than the GTA games did, which never really took being 'good' into the greater design of the game.
I think the reason there is a struggle with the concept of moral choices is because designers are afraid of scaring the player away from the game. If, by the Extra Credit video suggests, they go and make the moral choice much harder, will most people simply take the easier path just to complete the game? You want the choices to be hard, but you still want the options available to be attractive. If killing the little girl gives you power and saving her just gives you a bouquet of flowers, the game rules sort of push you towards evil, since power helps you finish the game more than a smiling girl.
So risk and reward make creating hard choices difficult.
