Out of Alignment: Ethical Systems and Player Agency in Baldur's Gate III and the CRPG Tradition

This thesis examines how computer role-playing games (CRPGs) construct, communicate, and transform moral systems through their design. Tracing the genre’s evolution from prescriptive virtue frameworks to dynamic, player-centred ethics, this study analyzes five signpost games, including Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (Origin Systems, 1985), Baldur’s Gate (BioWare, 1998), Dragon Age: Origins (BioWare, 2009), Divinity: Original Sin (Larian Studios, 2014), and Baldur’s Gate III (Larian Studios, 2023), to reveal how values are encoded, negotiated, and embodied in play. The central argument is that CRPGs have shifted from modeling morality as an external system to embedding it within player experience and world interaction. Early titles sought to instruct players in moral behaviour by quantifying virtue and linking ethical success to measurable progress. In contrast, contemporary CRPGs dissolve these fixed structures and create moral ecologies in which values emerge from player choices, systemic feedback, and interpersonal relationships. This evolution mirrors a broader cultural and philosophical movement away from rigid moral determinism toward an ethics of participation, context, and reflection. Methodologically, this project employs the Values at Play framework developed by Flanagan and Nissenbaum (2014) to analyze how games articulate and operationalize moral values through narrative, mechanics, and player engagement. Each game is treated as a designed moral architecture in which the interplay between rule systems, choice structures, and narrative framing shapes ethical experience. The framework is paired with a virtue ethics perspective that positions the player as a moral agent whose character and reasoning develop through play (Sicart, 2009; Ulbricht, 2022). This combination enables a layered reading of games as both technical artifacts and ethical texts. The findings suggest that CRPGs function as moral laboratories where players rehearse ethical reasoning and confront the consequences of their actions within complex systems. Over time, the genre increasingly privileges reflection over prescription. By embedding moral decision-making within dynamic systems rather than explicit codes, CRPGs invite players to practice practical wisdom, or phronesis, through iterative play. Ultimately, this thesis argues that CRPGs both depict and enact morality. They transform ethical inquiry into an interactive process and reveal that moral understanding is not a matter of alignment, but of engagement, relation, and becoming.