Regarding railroading and moral messages:
Ideally, I think, the GM controls the setting and the players (largely) control the plot (at the very least in terms of its development and outcome), and each of those aspects of the campaign may contain a moral subtext. Hence, a GM’s setting may be rife with moral issues, and even a specific set-up for an adventure may include a moral dilemma, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this so long as the players are ultimately in charge of what their characters are doing and are able to bend the plot according to their characters’ actions.
In short, to be a good GM, you need to have some ideas worthy of being explored, and then you have to be willing to let the players explore and expand upon them in their own way without trying to control every last detail of the plot. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t include any sort of moral themes within the setting or the set-ups to various situations in which the characters find themselves.
There’s this concept of logos, pathos, and ethos that exists in much of story-telling. The idea is that we have within ourselves a logical self (this might loosely correspond to Freud’s conception of the Ego), an emotional self (the Id), and an ethical self (the Superego), and that in order for a story to engage us fully, it needs to engage all three of our selves. Hence, when you find yourself really engaged with a story, whether it’s cinema or written, you might try analyzing it to see which aspects of the self the writer is engaging in each successive scene. I’ve done this, and it’s often interesting. The really good writers seem to consciously rotate from a logical problem that the characters have to work out (usually advancing the plot), to an emotional problem (dealing with the emotional fallout of whatever just happened), and then to an ethical problem (confronting an ethical dilemma created by the new status quo), and then back again to a logical problem like a sort of merry-go-round. The order isn’t consistent, but the way that well-crafted stories seem to switch from one personality aspect to the next... I get the feeling that this is being done consciously, and when it’s done well, it can be mesmerizing.
Hence, I think a GM would be remiss to not include some sort of moral themes in the setting and/or adventures. This is different from railroading. When you railroad the players, you really take away their freedom. But by including a moral dilemma here and there, you give them the opportunity to exercise their superegos, which, to my way of thinking, is all part of playing a fully-realized character.
One more thing I’ll add to this is that stories, when they are well-written, are often arguments in disguise. You may not like this, but I think it is human nature that we always subconsciously try to get to get some sort of generalized meaning, moral, or wisdom from whatever story we are being told. After all, it’s one of the main benefits of language that we can learn from other people’s mistakes. If you think back to your favorite novel, if you have one, my guess is that you might be able to think of a moral theme that’s in there, something that made you feel you had learned something by the time you’d finished it. Maybe, in some small way, it had even changed who you are.
Although RPG campaigns are not as rigorously plotted as some novels, these moral themes can emerge from them as well, and when they do, my own tendency is to welcome them and deal with them rather than trying to quickly brush them aside in favor of rolling lots of dice.
Regarding the Harrison Chapters:
Thanks to Phil for his kind comments. I started this novel back in high school and finished it while I was in college, and although I was somewhat proud of it at the time, it wasn’t long before I began to regard it as being mostly garbage. There are numerous problems with it, so many that I indefinitely delayed doing a rewrite.
Part of the problem is that I was pantsing it (as in writing from the seat of my pants sans outline) all the way through, so the plot is a bit twisted to the point of occasionally being irritatingly absurd. The other problem is that my conception of technology was grounded in what I imagined to be possible back in the 1980s and early 90s, and for whatever reason, I wasn’t able to imagine... well, cellphones, just as one example.
When you get into the details of future technology, you find that they really drive what is possible as well as what’s inevitable in terms of establishing the setting. It’s sort of frustrating actually, because looking back in retrospect, I had enough knowledge that I should have been able to craft a really interesting story with some important themes. After all, I knew about Moore’s Law. I knew that data storage and CPU cycles were getting cheaper every year. I knew that cameras were getting smaller and that everything was becoming connected through networks. So why couldn’t I imagine a world where governments have their citizens under constant surveillance? Actually, the issue of privacy and surveillance did enter into the novel in one of the early chapters, but I didn't work through the obvious implications.
Once the technology is there, it will be used by whoever has access to it, and there will be profound social ramifications. The whole point of science fiction is that we are supposed to be exploring these ideas before they become a reality. Instead, we seem to be busy fighting Zhodanis or Klingons or the dark side of the Force. In any case, I sort of feel like the novel was a failure mainly because I didn’t explore the most obvious moral issue that was sitting there right in front of me. For whatever reason, I couldn’t see it. It’s wasn't so much a failure of imagination as simply a failure of logic.