The case for morale

Have you ever been sitting somewhere in a survival game like The Long Dark, looking at a rusty can of dog food and thinking “sure, it’s calories, but what’s the emotional cost of this?”

I have, quite a few times. I’ll mostly be talking about The Long Dark in this post, because I’ve been playing it a lot recently, but I think this applies to ttrpgs too, and I’ll bring that up later on, with reference to my own games.

The sandbox mode of The Long Dark was never meant to be the focus of the game. Wintermute, the game’s story mode (which is still incomplete) was always the primary goal, and the two player characters Astrid and Will, were created and voiced for Wintermute by established and well known voice actors. If you’re a long term Mass Effect player like me, Astrid will sound very familiar to you. They sound like people. They have specific faces, and body types. And, controversially, they complain.

“I’ve never been this cold in my life” is a common refrain, (and it’s a damn lie, Will, you were this cold 3 days ago when we got caught in a blizzard) and there are dozens of similar voice lines, all to alert the player to condition statuses like a risk of hypothermia or starvation. It’s human, it’s mildly irritating, and it genuinely makes me feel guilty for feeding them things like dog food or cat tail stalks. To add to the empathy of the situation, the background worldbuilding of the game was done primarily by kickstarter backers who wrote little notes for the player to discover as they explore. A note where a teenager talks about sharing her last candy bar with a nice boy, a number of cairns named in memorium for strangers, and a recipe for bread next to the stove in a farmhouse do a lot to help you think about the people who are in the situation your character is in. Surviving. It can get emotional.

The thing is, in Wintermute, there are other characters. There are NPCs and quests. In sandbox mode, you are alone except for the memories people left behind. Entering day 100 of a save you start to think - “wait, what are my characters goals here? Just survive?” There’s no way off the island and exploring everything does little but stave off boredom. Long term players have invented multiple challenges to keep the game interesting for themselves - I’ve seen a “santa” run where a player left a gift of new makeshift mittens at every indoor fireplace in the game - and the game developers have added multiple challenges in-game as well. People like to have a motivation, especially when the game involves sitting inside and waiting out a blizzard, mindlessly sharpening your axe for something to do with your hands.

A simple motivator, to me, is morale. “Why am I exploring?” well, maybe I want ingredients for a stew so I don’t just eat canned beans for six meals in a row. Why bother carrying a painting around to hang it up in your safehouse if it’s not to make you smile when you see it? The game recently added safehouse customisation, and the ability to whittle and do woodworking, and I have to say, whittling a little wolf figurine while waiting out a blizzard felt extremely nice to do as a player. Imagine the satisfaction of getting a mechanical bonus for that.

In my head to avoid a “sanity” meter situation low morale would be a condition that impacted fatigue. Low energy makes you walk slower, makes it harder to carry things. From experience, low morale tends to make it harder to get a restful night’s sleep and makes you tired quicker. It’s a simple tie in, and I’d really appreciate it.

But to me, this goes beyond The Long Dark. There are multiple mods for Minecraft that expand the range of foods you can cook, despite the fact that the game cares not at all if you eat nothing but carrots covered in literal gold, or pork chops, or bread. Players don’t benefit from going out of their way to eat a rabbit stew or a beetroot soup (foods that both exist in game!) and it’s a hassle to make them and carry them around. So why not add some sort of varied diet buff, or monotonous diet debuff? The Sims 4 has a debuff for sims who eat nothing but “quick meals” and desserts to encourage you to actually cook.

Sure, not every player likes this sort of immersion as much as I do, but as someone who has genuinely been food insecure, this is a concern I have a lot. About 12 years ago I spent a month eating nothing but mashed potatoes, cheap sausages, and vegan scones (I couldn’t afford butter or milk). I was eating enough to live on, but I was so miserable that the counsellor I was spending $25 a week on waived my fee one week and told me to go buy some different food.

The fact of it is, monotony and boredom and a lack of fun and social interaction have a huge impact on the quality of life. People working in communities of poverty, and people who have experienced poverty, can speak to this with confidence. To me, that doesn’t evaporate in a survival situation so long as there are any periods of downtime at all.

I’d never really thought of this as a thing that was missing from games before I thought, but then I looked back at my own game design and realised - oh. I built this into my own “survival” games from the beginning.

Space Legs and Sea Legs both use a triple tiered “health” system I designed specifically to incorporate mental health alongside physical. The three tracks are: Doubt, designed to fluctuate and change. This represents your faith in the mission and your party, and can change on a dime. Hurt, which is more concrete, and represents the physical injuries your character sustains, and Hopelessness, which is the slowest moving and most impactful category. The only way a character is forced out of the story is by reaching the end of the Hopelessness track.

Maybe it’s my experience with long term mental illness, or maybe it’s something else, but obviously this is something of a recurring thought to me. I’d be interested to know - have you had thoughts of wanting morale in games? Do you actively dislike the idea of morale in games?

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See you next week!