In mid-October, we announced that the Level Up staff had taken its talent across the pond to the respected U.K. gaming magazine Edge, in the form of a monthly column titled "Playing in the Dark." It had always been our intent to expand on the topics raised in those columns here on Level Up under the rubric The Edge of Reason, but you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men. Our other favorite cliché is "better late than never," so with that, today's installment will tackle our very first Edge column, which ran in the November 2007 edition of the magazine under the title "Why It Feels Good to Be Bad" (click here to read the column in its entirety). In it, we pointed out that while videogames have become fairly accomplished at making us feel good about what we're doing, there's a whole lot more they could explore by making us feel bad about our actions. Here's an excerpt of our additional thoughts on whether developers should consider incorporating the concept of social sanction into videogames:

Certain other bloggers have already begun to discuss the issues that our column raises. As we'd written previously in our Vs. Mode exchange on BioShock and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, the very first presentation of the Little Sister Harvest-or-Rescue dilemma had us so conflicted that we actually called family and friends for guidance. Yet as our playthrough continued, each subsequent harvesting became much less emotionally fraught, making us wonder whether there wasn't more that 2K Boston/Australia could have done to keep us feeling just as tormented upon the sixth Harvesting as the first, if not more so.

Part of the reason most people don't kill or murder in real life is that there are real life consequences: social sanction, ostracism, retaliation, incarceration, capital punishment. In games, there are no real life consequences to in-game decisions made regarding AI characters. You won't be labeled, shunned, jailed or executed. Even the in-game consequences are minor; for all of our whining legitimate complaints about 2K Boston/Australia privileging Rescuers over Harvesters by exclusively bestowing upon them the Hypnotize Big Daddy plasmid, it wasn't what we'd consider a hefty punishment.

To read our post in its entirety, click on the link below.

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2. HIP...hop videogames are on people's minds these days
3. GOW...Storytelling in God of War and "Gladiator," compared
4. RND...Slowing DVD sales: the Grinch that steals Xmas 2007?