Continuing to the third part in this series, I want to introduce a system for handling morality that makes sense for complex situations. My goal is to come up with something procedural, intuitive enough to design for, and something that can handle even the most perverse of moral situations. Because every domain is different and has different moral and value systems, it makes sense that each game or story world will have a different set of statistics and parameters.

The reward for this is an analysis (keeping up with contemporary film and theatre) of Sweeney Todd, to be covered in the next post. The analysis will break down the cast into a spectrum of dimensions that demonstrates quite clearly that, far from being poles, good and evil are spread and intermingle in a complex swamp and neither is really possible to achieve without a helping of the other. Special thanks to Audrey , the domain expert, who helped me get this system and the analysis worked out. (more…)