Moral Revolution: About Half Who Played Deus Ex's Malik Mission Earned the Difficult "Good Soul" Achievement

I wrote about the "Malik mission" in Deus Ex: Human Revolution recently, a section of the game that's quite difficult to complete in an emotionally and morally satisfying way, but here's a very interesting thing: According to Steam's general achievement stats for the game, 27% of all DXHR players won the "Good Soul" award, which means they made the time and effort to do just that. And if we're looking at just the players who played the game long enough to even reach the Malik mission (which occurs about 2/3rds into the campaign), the percentage is much higher. Because according to Steam's stats, only 49% of players got far enough in the game to meet and defeat "The Snake", a boss who appears a few hours after the Malik mission:

So it's safe to estimate that about half the total players who got as far as the Malik mission took the time to do it "right". And as I said, that's no easy task. It took me maybe 2-3 hours of trial and error to do so. To me, this leads to a very interesting realization: When faced with a difficult and optional task which has a "better" outcome -- better in a storytelling sense, better in a moral values sense-- many or even most players rose to the challenge.

Here's what I mean -- and be warned, DXHR SPOILERS are below:

By "Malik mission", I'm talking, of course, about the ambush on Malik's airship. You have the option of just escaping, but if you do that, your comrade and friend is slaughtered. But seeing as she's besieged by nearly ten heavily armed commandos and a battle bot, it seems impossible to rescue her. For most players, it requires many attempts, many times dying, and many times having to hear Malik on your com system coughing up her last words. And still, nearly half the players faced with this challenge would not let it go, until Malik was safe. Many even made the effort to complete the mission non-lethally, making it all the more difficult and time consuming (but arguably, also more moral):

No doubt a lot of gamers were driven to win the Good Soul award because it's a fun challenge to overcome. At the same time, I'm very confident most were just as motivated (if not more so) by the feeling of doing the right thing -- the satisfaction of seeing a character they care about survive, and even thank them for their efforts. This tracks to observations made by folks like Jane McGonigal -- gamers don't just want to win, they want a feeling of making a difference in their world, and expressing their values. I'd love to see more missions like this in future games, which don't just challenge us to defeat enemies, but challenge us even more to make a difference in the lives of others.

Comments

[Arcadia Codesmith]

You may be underestimating the number of gamers who want the badge for the sake of compulsive completeness, not out of any warm fuzzy feeling.

But I'll take that over game designs that don't even bother to consider the moral dimensions.

Given the pervasive mechanic of "kill everything, level up", it'd be nice to see an MMO where wading in and killing everything might have some bad consequences and repercussions down the line.

[Damien Fate]

I didn't do it for the badge.

I played that mission and couldn't believe what happened, I was certain I could change it. Without looking up any guide to see if it was even possible I tried and tried again to get a different outcome - the game had taught me as much up to that point.

When I finally accomplished my goal on that mission, it felt so great :)