I finished GTAIV the other day, so I’ve been reading various forum threads about it – checking out what other people think of the endings and so on – and I was struck by how often I saw posts like this (slightly edited) one from Pieman at Penny Arcade:

Thought I'd share this phenomenon I experienced with this game. When I first started out as Nico and heard about his tragic back story I was determined not to spill any innocent blood, to the point that I felt guilty once when my car spun out of control and knocked over a man timidly tending to his hot dog stand. But as the story line progressed and you found yourself in deeper shit, I found myself more ... willing to run over the old lady who took too long to cross that street, or fire a shotgun shell into the face of a guy who got out of his car to punch you in the face. It was like my character was angry at this city, and the fake promise of the American dream that brought him there. I think it’s partly Nico's well done characterisation too. Every time he yells out an animal cry after firing off a few rounds into someone it feels like hes reverting to the violent side that he tried to put aside, but ultimately he can't escape it. Anyway ... these are a few random thoughts from someone whose about half way through the story.

A lot of people, it seems, think that Nico is a morally compelling protagonist. Not only do they understand and empathise with his motivations, they also change their in-game behaviour to better suit his character. Which is exactly what I did.

The more I knew about Nico’s circumstances and personality, the more I found myself tailoring my behaviour to suit them. Like Pieman there, I actually tried to be relatively nice for most of the game. Of course, I was still playing GTA, so I was still killing whores and stealing cars and so on – but I wasn’t doing it indiscriminately. That's the big thing. In GTAIII, which is the only other GTA I’ve played extensively, I’d go on senseless rampages every twenty minutes. But in this one, it just didn’t feel right. The difference? GTAIII's protagonist doesn't have a personality.

The literature on moral development makes it very clear that many of our moral values are strongly determined by role expectations. As evidenced by one of the most hilariously unethical psychology experiments of the 20th Century, people tend to alter their values and behaviour according to how they perceive their role in a given situation. People pretending to be prison guards act like prison guards. People pretending to be prisoners act like prisoners. People pretending to be Nico Belic act like Nico Belic. And since Nico’s character is so powerfully realised, that entails acting in quite specific ways, some of which are morally motivated.

Compare that to GTAIII. Actually, wait – compare it to Bioshock. Bioshock’s another game with a voiceless cipher for a protagonist, but unlike GTAIII, everyone thinks it’s a profound moral masterpiece. I disagree. For me, Bioshock’s much-discussed moral dilemmas were completely unengaging, and I suspect the main reason for that is that the player character (he doesn’t even have a name) is a total vacuum. This guy, whoever he is, doesn’t have a voice, he doesn’t have values, he doesn’t have opinions. He’s just an avatar – two arms and a weapon. He doesn’t provide a structure for your behaviour in the game, and doesn’t provide a context through which his moral choices are rendered meaningful. Ultimately, he’s just a collection of game mechanics, and so you play him as such.

Admittedly, you could make the argument that it’s up to the player to provide the protagonist’s moral perspective, but for some reason it seems many people (me included) are reluctant to do that. Maybe it’s too hard; maybe it’s just easier on your ego to imagine how someone else would act in strange and demanding circumstances. It’s easy to be Nico in GTAIV because he belongs in that world. But who belongs in Bioshock? I'm not sure, but I'll tell you who doesn’t belong there: me. So why should I be expected to play as though I do?

Oh, and one more thing – this image from the Mail & Guardian online:

 Completely unrelated, but hilarious nonetheless.