I've never understood why so many games label the player's moral standing. I'm pretty sure people know whether they're trying to act "good" or "bad." More importantly, if the game responds appropriately to my actions a label should be unnecessary. And the even finer distinctions some games offer just seem superfluous ("Cool, I just moved up from being a Good person to a Very Good person!").

To comment on the main point of you article, I think you're right on target. People are going to want to play all the way through MW2 whether their virtual actions seem immoral or not. I try to be "the good guy" when playing my games, but I'm not going to give up seeing the rest of a game to hold that position, especially if the narrative presents no choice in the matter.

Ha, too true! :)

Good point about the extra computation required for additional expressions driven by bones in the characters' faces. I want to say that it's worth the processor cycles to enhance the characters over say, environmental visuals, but that's not necessarily true. In many games the environment is the most important character. It really depends on the game how much return you'd get on such an investment, and how deep such an investment should go (Gears of War would max out its benefits more quickly than a game like Fallout 3, for example).

However, most game characters I come across seem to already have pretty high poly counts. The faces of the Gears of War soldiers have very high poly counts, and they seem to be going to waste during gameplay. If a game character has bones for all of his finger joints, and I'm not saying they all do, that's 30 bones right there. I've created some pretty expressive characters using about the same number facial bones, give-or-take a few based on the requirements. So I don't think it's an unreasonable addition.

It's worth noting that engines like Gamebryo support bone LODs (levels of detail) that allow you to turn off the computation of bone positions when the character is a certain distance from the player. I've worked with this and we always turned off the facial bones of characters until they got close enough to the player for the effects to be seen. You have to make sure there is no visible 'pop' of the bones jumping to different positions when activating, but it's not a hard problem to deal with.

My fiance is of the same opinion (basically) regarding game characters expressing pain and fear - she worries that it won't stop people from killing them anyway and will just desensitize players to violence (perhaps real violence) even more than they already are.

I don't know...all I can say is I personally want there to be games where I can believe, if only during the playtime, that the characters running around have lives of their own - their own fears, goals, interests, etc. Maybe I'm alone in that, but I believe there is value to be found in such a treatment. Maybe not in all cases, but it feels necessary in certain appropriate situations for a more mature experience.

It's true that right now games are most often combat-fests, but I think it's important to think about what they could be in the future. Not once have I spent an entire day carrying a gun around in the real world (even police officers don't hold their gun out all day long), and when games are able to be interesting without the need to constantly shoot people, guns become less relevent. Can we make a fun, immersive game that doesn't involve killing, or at least not much violence? I think so, I hope so, but I'm not sure how much validity emergent stories will have until we can do so.