So I’ve recently dumped my current “must-play” game Pirates! in favour of Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (one of the shortest titles ever), and am about seven or eight hours into the forty-ish hour game.

It seems that a lot of people prefer playing evil roles in games (there are probably more links, but I can’t remember right now) but I for one have difficulty playing an evil character in games like this. In Fable, for instance, I played the game exactly how I felt at the time. Sometimes I was slightly evil, but mostly I was a good-guy. This is pretty much how I always play video games with a “good/evil” choice structure (usually it’s pretty obvious, too).

I wonder why that is; if there’s an option to talk a poor person out of his money, and then send him on a quest to attack his mother-in-law with a chainsaw, I just can’t do it. Instead, I save their whole family, pay off their mortgage and arrange for their daughter to marry a wealthy prince. I can’t bring myself to hurt these poor little digital characters.

Perhaps it’s just my nature, perhaps it’s from years of playing RPGs and being forced to be the good-guy. Often when I finish a game, playing it “as I feel” (in other words, I end up as a very good-guy), I will go back and play a little bit as the bad guy (or in the case of the first Knights of the Old Republic, go back to the pivotal point where the endings are chosen, and play as the evil character. Still, it’s not my first choice to act like that.

I wonder then, with so many people saying they enjoy playing as evil characters, is it because they are inherently bad themselves, or just prefer to play things out in that way because they aren’t “allowed to” in real life?

I’m rather tired this morning. It probably has something to do with the fact that I installed and played the remake of Sid Meier’s Pirates! last night. I started playing at around 7:00, I remember looking at the clock a short time later and it showed 9:45. “No matter”, I thought, “I’ll play just a little longer and then go to bed at a respectable hour.” I rolled into bed at 12:45. Oops.

This is a game I’ve been anticipating for quite a while now and I’m glad to say that — at least initially — it’s as fun (if not more, due to the wider range of stuff to do) that the original, which I played for many an hour.

After all those hours of playing last night with my first character (appropriately named Threepwood), I still haven’t done everything I want to. I have thousands of acres of land, am an Admiral in Her Majesty’s (or possibly His, since it’s set in the late 1600s) Navy (as well as having titles with the Spanish, French and Dutch), have married a busty governer’s daughter and am the second-most notorious pirate in the Caribbean (having defeated the first two of the top ten, along with some other less popular guys).

I’m sure I’ll get some work done today, but I just want to go home and be a pirate. That’s the life for me!