This essay is, presumably, going to take on an extremely preachy tone. It's rather inherent to the subject matter really. What I'm going to get into here is the whole notion of alignments in games, particularly RPGs. Any general philosophy of life angle that you take out of it is purely coincidental.

There are, basically, two main ways to approach the whole alignment angle in games. We can either place all our characters and creatures on a good-to-evil scale, or we can place various actions (often with a lot of situational concerns) on such a scale, and use it as a moral code for our characters.

I absolutely abhor the first case here, and the amazing degree of hypocrisy that comes with it. Basically, the idea comes down to this. Certain types of creatures (for example, cute widdle puppies) are inherently good. Others (for example, big snarly orcs) are inherently evil. Humans (and, really, all available PC races) generally get special treatment, and pick one alignment or the other. Generally this is played up as making them special with their nuanced morality, but really it's because if we didn't do this, the GM couldn't make big scary NPCs built with the standard player creation rules.

Aside from the fact that all the good races tend to be cute and cuddly (or at least kind and non-threatening and down to earth) and all the evil races are ugly befanged cave dwellers and such who dig black leather, there isn't really any fundamental difference between the two. You can say "oh, but the evil side are all bloodthirsty monsters out to kill every good creature out there!" I can come back and say "So naturally, as strong heroic members of the good side, you consider it your civic duty to kill all these evil creatures?" The hypothetical "you" here often misses the point. Everyone wants to kill half of everyone, and really you're just making a choice between having cute or ugly allies.

Let's examine what's wrong with this sort of thinking a bit more. A case study I'm really fond of is a pretty extensive series of conversations I had with people when they first got into World of WarCraft. This sort of thing presumably doesn't hold water anymore, because the first expansion added new races specifically to counteract this trend (and it also made some really painful retcons to the official mythology I'm told). The conversation that really best illustrates the point started with someone asking in a public venue something along the lines of "Why it is that the minotaur race were part of the evil side, because they really seemed to have a good guy vibe? Meanwhile the dark elves are on the good side, what gives?"

Here's what I find hilarious about this, for those who don't know. World of WarCraft takes place right after the end of the expansion to WarCraft 3. If we just look at the first two games in the series, we can go ahead and accept the standard of humans are good, orcs are evil without too much trouble. However, at the point on the timeline we're at now, judging based on appearances tends not to work very well. Orcs are a one-time proud warrior race which, after having spent roughly 3 generations as slaves have quite recently finally earned their freedom, hopped on a boat and gone to find an uninhabited plot of land to avoid conflict, get back in touch with nature, and do some farming. Their allies include the jungle trolls, who while being distantly related to the rather nasty forest trolls of WarCraft 2, personally have no real wars in their history, and a culture blatantly on that of jamaica. Then of course come the Tauren, our good seeming minotaurs, who are some of the most clear-cut good guys to be found in any work of fiction, being a heavily idealized take on Native Americans, herbivores, and being just about the only race in this setting who, upon having new cultures arrive in their ancestral homelands, great them with open arms. World of WarCraft also lumps one of the two warring undead factions in with the orcs and friends, with no real basis other than a common enemy we'll get to shortly. Specifically, the humans who were poisoned, turned into mindless slaves of the undead army, eventually managed to regain their memories and will, overthrew the undead leader, and had their still living friends and family still want to kill them on the grounds that, well, they are still zombies and all.

Then we have the humans, default good guys in most games. Here, we can't particularly vilify the entire race, but their leadership has some pretty serious issues. Way back when, they were pretty justified in a war where they allied with elves dwarves and gnomes to fight off some orcs trolls goblins and ogres (in WarCraft 2). After this, they enslaved all the surviving orcs for a good long time, got involved in a new conflict with an army of the undead which as mentioned above, boiled down at the end to killing a bunch of their own people on what amounts to the grounds of them having a nasty skin condition (specifically, not having skin). After dealing with that problem, they decided to celebrate by spontaneously stabbing the ally of their click who took the worst pounding through all this (the elves) by basically abandoning them to be killed by the remaining undead and so forth in the area while they go off to start a new war. Said new war being a genocidal campaign against the orcs and their new hippie friends, started up just after these races helped out in a huge joint effort to save the world from a demon invasion. No real prompting, they just take issue to anyone with tusks it seems. The current allies of the humans include the dwarves and gnomes, who really receive no attention at all in the story, but might also have been turned on by the humans if they weren't helping out so much by discovering gunpowder, and the night elves. The confused person who started us down this history lesson here mistook these for dark elves, which are a standard of RPGs, where you take a subgroup of elves, and make them demon worshiping cave-dwellers. Not the case here. WarCraft's night elves are the original branch of the elf family tree, who kicked all the others out over various internal disputes. Politically speaking, the night elves have two main claims to fame. First, they almost brought about the end of the world, by calling down demons and general evil badness in a quest for immortality... and upon defeating those demons and losing their immortality, a bunch of them decided, more or less immediately, to do the exact same thing again, with more or less the same results. They're also a bit on the xenophobic side. Upon first encountering a new race, their first instinct tends to be to slaughter them before they can start encroaching on their territory. This attitude extends to a general policy of slaughtering any members of their own race who end up disfiguring themselves in an attempt to deal with all the supernatural evil their race has unleashed. It comes up more often than you'd think really. Much like the undead, the night elves are rather shoehorned in with the humans for the sake of having 2 sides in WoW. The night elves and humans did have to ally together to save the world from demons recently (along with the orcs), and presumably neither side is inclined to break that friendship up and start killing each other while they're both busy picking on smaller older enemies, and in the elves' defense, they're late to the party and don't know the history their new friends have.

So, the short version is, while you can largely justify everyone as essentially good but with a few bad apples if you try hard enough, really WoW's two factions are a bunch of nice ugly hippies trying to keep to themselves, and a bunch of more pleasant looking genocidal racists. In other words, the orcs are the good guys, and the humans are the bad guys, contrary to how these things generally work out. Now, the part that's really interesting to me is how the players of WoW approached this whole situation, at least in the first few months after the game's release, on the dozen or so servers I surveyed.

The majority of people I came across, playing on the horde side, were people who knew the story behind this game, or were drawn to the shamanistic style of things, and decided to play the laid back hippies. For the most part, they all seemed to focus mainly on actually completing quests and fighting big nasty evil things, as one tends to do in this sort of game. The undead race tended to attract a more vindictive crowd, because people rarely want to play as a nice friendly zombie. This is still appropriate to the actual plot of the game though, as these undead are, again, members of our genocidal human race who have their own people trying to kill them. I can see such people wanting to go on the occasional killing spree.

The alliance side of things meanwhile, back in the day, seemed to largely be populated by newcomers to the WarCraft setting. These people looked at the available races, assumed the cuter looking ones were the good guys, and by extension that the orcs and so forth must be a bunch of horrible evil monsters terrorizing humanity that needed to be dealt with. During the brief time I spent playing WoW, there were many many days when it was practically impossible to play as a new horde character, as massive swarms of ultra-high-level alliance characters would pile onto boats, sail over to the crossroads (a tiny little town way off in the boonies where low level horde characters were all funneled to get the quests appropriate to their level) and proceeded to kill every quest giving NPC, along with any players who attempted to fight them off. It's most likely a safe bet that they'd have killed all the various low level players too if the game didn't offer conditional invulnerability to people who didn't actively pick fights in other people's territory.

What I really found interesting about this phenomenon is that it was a rather one-sided affair. There were no in-game incentives at the time for engaging in any sort of player vs. player combat yet implemented, and once there were, these only applied to reasonably fair fights. The only quests which involved causing havoc in the other side's towns the game presented were in areas for higher level characters in areas of territorial dispute plot-wise. The alliance equivalent of the crossroads never that I was aware of had huge horde forces storming it just to cause grief for new players. The whole phenomenon here was owed entirely to the mind set of the uglier races being inherently evil monsters with whom fights should be picked where possible. Amazingly appropriate, when this is exactly the attitude the humans have in terms of the game's actual plot. Again, before people start chewing me out, this was a strong trend on a good number of WoW servers for the first three or four months of the game's existence, and didn't last much past there. It's still interesting though.

So, what's the lesson here? Subscribing to the mind set of particular sorts of creatures being inherently good or evil frequently prompts "good" characters to commit actions one is hard pressed not to label as evil.

Things really come out screwy when we add neutrality into the mix. If we have good characters, who spend all their time killing evil, and evil characters spend all their time killing good, what do we call the people who go out of their way not to kill anything? We call them neutral. We're also using the term neutral in a negative tone here. The implication is that if you were truly a properly moral person, you'd drop that non-violent attitude, and start slaughtering monsters like everyone who has any courage. That's just a horrifying attitude to be inherent to the rules of a game. It's even worse to realize that someone who indiscriminately kills every living creature that crosses their path is also considered neutral by this mind set, assuming they live in an area with roughly equal numbers of cute widdle puppies and big snarling orcs anyway. Sure, we're not calling them good, but we're implying that they do have the moral high ground relative to about half the things they're slaughtering... and in the same boat as pacifists.

I have a good deal more to say on this subject, but I think we'll have to save that for another essay. For now, I'll leave things with this. Under no circumstances, unless perhaps we have a game based around angels and demons, should a character sheet ever have a little line on which one writes good or evil. For monster lists, this is even less appropriate.

Continued in part 2: Moral Codes