Honestly enough, I think it has less to do with moral religious themes and more to do with tempting you, the player, with choices and incentives to get into a bad end. If the writer simply put "bad end or good end?" There'd be no motive. While I agree with the idea of allowing all paths to be fun and sexy, I don't agree that puritans indoctrinated the dev into fleshing out the story the way he did.
So... where's the bad ends for being a bad person? Be an asshole... get a sexy pic, game over. Steal from someone... get money, game over. Murder people... get their stuff, game over. Nope. It's be a
pervert... get a sexy pic, game over. If it really wasn't about puritanism then it wouldn't only happen with being overly-lewd. I suppose mind-control games do subvert this sometimes with "be a doormat... get a sexy pic, game over," but still.
And trying to motivate people to fail means you've already failed to understand what a game is. If all a game's bad choices are so obvious that the dev needs to motivate people to take them then the problem isn't that players aren't motivated... it's that dev sucks at writing. And I don't think the writing in StD is anywhere close to that bad. For example, it was trying to save Cherry that got her corrupted... you took the apparent best choice and it turned out bad. That's life, often enough... and that you potentially don't see it coming is good writing. However, what would have been more in line with the nature of a game is if there had been something you could do earlier on to learn that this was the wrong choice and use that knowledge to take another path with delayed gratification. Like maybe repeated blowjobs will keep her alive and sane... and later on you can find a way to have sex without it corrupting her. I realize there has to be
some negative outcomes that are unavoidable... what I'm asking for is that the positive outcomes don't involve avoiding sex in a game about sex. The example i'm giving with Cherry is just meant to prove that such
can be accomplished... that Bad Ends aren't the only way.
A perfect example is the Little Sisters in Bioshock. Harvest one (the bad choice) and you get a large surge in Adam (the single most important resource in the game) on the spot. Save one and you get nothing... until later on the Little Sisters leave an even bigger cache of Adam and some free plasmids. Now imagine if rescuing a little sister had no reward at all and harvesting gets you a burst of Adam but fifty scavengers come out of the wood work all at once to kill you for it. It becomes a lose-lose... better to just ignore the Little Sisters entirely... in that case
the only way to win is not to play. A good game developer never,
ever wants that to be true.
THAT is a game: Challenge -> Successful Application of Skill (even simple empathy) ->
Reward -> Rise and Repeat. The whole point is to tap into the brain's built-in serotonin reward cycle. The only reason pron games can even get away with Bad Ends is that they tap into our mating instincts instead... and being the dumb apes we are we will engage in all sorts of stupidity for a chance at pussy/dick.
Like I said, the dev can do whatever they want. And given the current porn-game market they will probably still be successful. I just tire of being _punished_ for successful application of skill by being denied the very thing that got me to play the game to begin with.
P.S. It's also noteworthy that Bioshock fed the serotonin loop but wasn't afraid to force bad outcomes down your throat occasionally.
Would you kindly? You can't not kill Andrew Ryan... and absolutely nothing good comes of it in the story. But it creates drama and sets up the rest of the game's central antagonist. The point is Bioshock feeds the serotonin loop the rest of the time. As does every other successful non-porn game.