LatwPIAT

Though depending on the game, ethics are often as deep as gameplay mechanics allow, regardless of how deep the designers built it. There's quite the difference between the Technical Pacifist and the Pacifist. If I'm going to sink a superfreighter, it won't affect anything if I leave unconscious bodies inside, and no-one will be affected, but I've heard of people who took the extra steps of dragging every single unconscious body onto the docks just so that they could justify their own pacifism. Another Deus Ex example, just to illustrate. The game essentially forces you to kill a certain character at one point. You cannot knock the unconscious. However, through some clever environmental manipulation, it is possible to bypass the fight. The game won't acknowledge this, if I remember correctly, but I doubt that anyone chose to leave the exploit used. At another point NPCs react negatively and/or positively towards a player based on whether a certain NPC acted, rather than the player actually acted. If you go pacifistic, but accidentally trigger the event, well, JC will actually claim he killed a whole lot of people, as will other character, and they will negatively reward the player. I still don't think I'm anything less of a pacifist, so in this case my moral interpretation of the game goes "deeper" than the game itself. Of course, some games have terribly broken morality, such as Mirror's Edge, which rewards pacifism, yet has a cutscene where the main character kills some mooks. Additionally, games that rely heavily on scripted events and a brute-forced narrative will usually have a more limited morality system than games where the player is left to his own devices, so there certainly is some relation.

Deus Ex didn't have many optional quests in the classical sense, but it did integrate the NPCs into the game in a quest-like fashion, it was just that often the player (Unless they had played before) did not know of the existence of the quest. If you talk to a kid, he'll reveal the NSF password for a Soy Food package. You haven't actually been told he will do this. He just will. Likewise, if you save one of the Mole People from thugs, he'll tell you the Mole People password. At this point, you haven't actually been told you even need this password, or that taking down the thugs will do anything at all, or that the mole people even exist. All you know is that thugs are threatening a bum. There's also an issue of sidequests making sense. While an anti-terrorist agent might want to look into a pimp with terrorist connections beating up the daughter of the local hotel owner or investigate the kidnapping of a biochemist by heavily armed mooks, there's really no reason for him to help people with their laundry, and there's no reason anyone would ever ask JC to help them with their laundry. Since Alpha Protocol probably is going to share some elements with Deus Ex (Who wants to make bets on when your parent organization betrays you? I bet a cookie that it's at the half-way-point.) what applies to Deus Ex would occasionally apply to Alpha Protocol too. While Thornton might not want to do people's laundry, looking for a rumored third-party spy while beating down on a terrorist takeover of an embassy or cracking down on an FSK barricade to get better deals from an arms dealer might be things that the player should be allowed to do.