10 Video Game Heroes Forced To Die For The Greater Good

An interesting concept first discussed by Philippa Foot is the 'trolley problem'.

In this scenario you are a trolley conductor faced with two options: Continue on your course and run over one person, or switch tracks and run over five. Alterations to the experiment substitute the latter with elderly people and the one with a child, but the ideology is still the same. Is it better to kill one, or five?

Neither option is ideal, but sometimes needs must when it comes to the greater good.

But what is the greater good? Somewhat of a subjective concept with an open-ended interpretation depending on one's own moral compass. This list is more for the times where the greater good is plain for everyone to see.

Noble sacrifices have long been captured in all forms of entertainment - film, television, video games, comics, or anything where there are characters and something at stake - because they evoke one of the strongest reactions from the viewers and readers.

A much-loved character must give their own life for the betterment of others?

There is hardly a better way to go.

In the most convoluted entry of this list, we have Bioshock: Infinite protagonist, Booker DeWitt. What makes this convoluted is the fact that he must allow himself to be killed so that his other self never exists and all of the events and history of the game are undone.

Bioshock: Infinite revolves around Booker's attempted rescue of his daughter, Elizabeth, and fight against her captor, Zachary Hale Comstock, the leader of the floating city of Columbia. Via an inter-dimensional trade between Booker and Comstock when Elizabeth was just a baby, her pinky was severed by a tear in time. The fact that her body existed in two plains of existence allowed Elizabeth to warp these tears.

Towards the end of the story, Elizabeth and Booker work out that Comstock exists across multiple different dimensions due to some versions of Booker choosing to be baptised. Elizabeth deduces that, should Booker never be baptised, then Comstock would never exist.

Travelling back in time to the time of his would-be baptism, Booker allows multiple different Elizabeth's to drown him, thus ending the cycle and preventing Comstock from ever existing.

Doing this means that Booker trading Elizabeth (or Anna as she is originally named) could never have happened, as Comstock will never have existed to request her in the first place, thus saving her.