I find that I have a hard time taking the total bastard rout when I play video games, I don't know if this mirrors my actual sense of morality. In real life when a person has more to lose would they be more or less likely to act in their own self interest? Would the burden of conscious or social alienation increase their the odds that a person would take the hard pro-social decision.
I haven't played Walking Dead but am curious if anyone on Hubski has. Did you feel any conflict at the decisions you had to make. Mining games for ethical data seems like a pretty interesting thing to do. There is a wealth of economic data that has only started to be analysed in recent years, maybe this is another interesting source of experimental data. It's an amazing way to run experiments for economics, very easy to change prices or supply/demand, seems like setting up ethical experiments could be easy in some games. Could there be a day when sociologist work with and help fund games development?
Reminds me of the game Fable (I haven't played 2 or 3, just the first one). My first time through the game, I played the hero at every choice. Near the end, my shining-white angelic paladin character moves, leaving butterflies in his wake, literally. Second time through, played the villain - and the character turned as ugly as his actions, horned, dark and malevolent - leaving bloody footprints. Nicely done.
I loved Fable, despite Peter Molyneux's over promising, but I always find games with alignments to be too simplistic. For instance in Fable 3 (non-plot realted spoilers ahead) at one point you can choose to instigate a sort of one-child policy (evil) or encourage people to have children with government support (good). Later you get can legalize child labour (evil) or fund schools (good). I of course chose to encourage child-birth, while legalizing child labour and having taxes and rent across the kingdom so high that I would have a massive, expendable, cheap labour force. My now-wife was a bit shocked at my penchant for evil in games, especially since it so starkly conflicted with how I acted in real life. IMO, games where there are no real-world ties (i.e. non-multiplayer games) would be a bad source for data on morality.