So, let's say that you're a game designer who wants to make a game that presents the player with enough freedom of action to be able to make their own moral choices. First of all, you're not alone; it seems that lately "moral choices" is the current popular buzzword. A lot of upcoming games play with this idea -- Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins offers the player a number of conversational options that determine how he or she is perceived by the active party and the world around them in general. Depending on how you work things, you could end up affronting one of your party members so seriously that they'll leave the group, or even worse, attack you outright.

An even better example would be Grand Theft Auto 4. Pretty much from the get-go, you're called upon to make tough choices -- who to kill, who to spare, who to help, who to hurt. And (no spoilers here) by the end of it all, no matter how you've chosen, you still kinda lose. It's safe to say that there's a fairly significant spectrum of options in the "moral choice" arena, from less effective to more effective. But do any of these choices really matter? Because you're playing a game, one that you can turn off and walk away from at any time, how much of an affect on your psyche do any of these decisions have?

During the Giant Bomb Game of the Year Edition podcast, Jeff Gerstmann defended his choice of GTA4 for Game of the Year by saying that the game so faithfully depicted a particular character that resembled someone he knew that at one point he was emotionally overwhelmed and had to pause for a while. "Games don't do that," he said quietly. But maybe they should, Will Wright is saying. Maybe truly affective games only work when their reality matches yours on some level. It works well in the case of the GTA universe because it's one that's grounded in reality. You probably couldn't get that sort of intimacy from, say, World of Warcraft, or Dead Space. Maybe it's only when the game world bears a close enough resemblance to your world that the in-game choices you make start to have an impact on your emotions.