Being A Renegade In Sainsbury's

Queueing for the Sainsbury's self service machines is an art form. First of all you have to stand in precisely the right position: not too close to the tills that you are blocking the corridor, but not too far that people think they can jump the queue. You must also (in the Putney Sainsbury's at least) position your self at a slight angle, to peer around a pillar and get a view of all the machines at once. After positioning, you must wait. Finally someone moves and you spring in for the attack, knocking children with sweets out of the way first (not really). It is stressful and sometimes things are worse.

Sometimes, the person before you leaves something at the till and you must hastily make a decision as you see them disappear out the double doors to the street, never to be seen (by you) again. This happened to me today, as a well dressed man left his receipt and £3.82 change in the till. I didn't really have time to think as he strolled casually into the sun. If I ran after him not only would I lose my place in the queue, but the shop attendants might think I was running out of the shop with a basket full of stir-fry ingredients (the most middle-class shoplifter?) If I kept the money, I would feel guilty. What if he came back and found someone had knicked it? Perhaps he was saving that money for a beer or a bag of chips? 

As he walked out of the shop: home to his wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/lonely-flat-filled-with-budgies, I settled on the neutral option. I gave the change to an attendant and asked them to look after it (I even gave a description of the man like I was Kevin 'effin Spacey). 

As I walked out of the shop feel slightly pleased with myself (but also annoyed that I didn't 'do more') it struck me that the moral decision (albeit a really small one) that I had to make happened in a moment. In a couple of seconds, I had to decide what was the right course of action. With this thought, I remembered playing the Mass Effect series of video games. In these games, the player fights and befriends various members of various alien species. The outcome of the game is determined by the moral choices that the player makes. They can either choose to become more powerful through cheating, killing, back-stabbing and lying (known in the game as "Renegade"), or they can be honest, kind and just (known as "Paragon"). In certain conversations within the game, players are faced with the decision to give a renegade, a paragon, or a neutral answer.

In Mass Effect, players must sometimes choose a moral course which a certain conversation will take. In the above example, the player must choose between saving a prisoner's life, killing the prisoner, or killing the person who wishes to kill the prisoner.

This makes for an awesome gaming experience, since the narrative literally changes (albeit not very dramatically) with each decision. But as much as I like to fool myself while playing similar games, it is nowhere near real-life. For a start, the very fact the player is prompted to make a decision, lets the player know that there is a decision to be made - they can then start thinking about the possible advantages and disadvantages of each decision. In Sainsbury's earlier, I spent about half the time in which a decision had to be made even noticing that I had a choice. 

The conversations in Mass Effect always halt when a decision needs making. This again allows the player to spend time thinking through the possible consequences of their actions (I spent literally tens of minutes deciding how to answer some of the more morally weighty questions). In Sainsbury's I had perhaps 5 seconds (2 of which were taken up realising that there was a decision to be made) in which to make my (admittedly very small) moral choice. And to be honest, I messed it up. What I should have done is instantly run towards the man and ask if he would like his change. If this had been Mass Effect, that is the option I would have picked. But I ran out of time.

And here's the thing. Games like Mass Effect have to give the player time to make moral choices because of the way they are played. Keyboards, buttons and joysticks give a limited number of possible outcomes. In the real world, I could have come up with any number of imaginative ways to give the man his money back (find out who he was from the staff, print off 'found loose change posters', throw the change at him etc. etc. [please let me know more]). Each of these decisions would need to have a different input. Already things are looking complex - effectively, the more outcomes for each choice in a game (making it more 'real-world'), the more buttons there would have to be on a controller. 

Even surpassing the physical restriction of not having enough buttons, the programmes would have to be vastly complex. For each decision, new code must be written (I assume this is true, but a computer scientist might like to correct me). If every decision had (basically) infinite choices, this would make the code unmanageable. Of course one way of doing this would be to have a computer write new code based on the outcome of each decision but (again someone correct me) to my knowledge we're a long way from accomplishing this for a video game. 

Next generation consoles look visually amazing (as do PCs of course), but without being able to incorporate simple, everyday interactions, computer games will remain a long way from completely simulating life while still providing a convincing narrative. Mind you, who would  want to play a game that involves queueing for a Sainsbury's self-service checkout?