Morality and Video Games – A Brief Look at the Literature

Hi all,

Sorry about not posting anything yesterday. I was traveling from school back to home and then got distracted by hanging out with friends and the like. I am still working on Chapter 5 of the Fall of Gilneas and it’s a little slow going, mostly because I have had (and still have) some things that needed to get done, which has cut into my writing time.

In the meantime, I figured it was time for a non-writing post. I couldn’t choose between psychology or gaming, so I decided, why not both? Below is an excerpt from a paper I wrote for one of my graduate level classes. Specifically, this section investigates morality and moral choices in video games. Instead of reinventing the wheel and writing it again, I’ll just post what I said about it at that time. Feel free to post any comments or questions. I hope you find this interesting and informative. The whole paper also looks at other psychological aspects of video games, so you may see more of it later. Citations are included at the end of this post.

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Video games differ significantly from other media such as books and television in that they provide their consumers with a sense of agency – that is, the player feels as if they are directly responsible for the progression of the story, whereas book readers are at the mercy of the author. However, this sense of agency was, for the longest time, an illusion in that players’ actions could not ultimately affect the storyline. In recent years, however, game developers have been implementing moral choice systems into their games with real impacts on the story. In the above vignette, the player is presented with a choice that is, by many accounts, a clear divide between good and evil: namely, kill for personal gain or save at personal expense. The choices the player makes, though, defines how other characters in the game interact with the player (with disgust or affection) and even changes the subsequent series of events and the ending of the game. While this example was fairly black and white, other games have implemented a more subtle approach to morality that increases the amount of responses that would fall under the grey area between moral and immoral.

How does the concept of morality factor in to players’ experience? Some evidence suggests that games that elicit emotional responses from players significantly contributed to player’s creation of meaning and engagement with the game (Oswald, Prorock, & Murphy, 2014). In addition, empathetic players experience a real reaction of guilt when performing an in-game immoral act, as well as a sense of personal goodness when acting morally (Hartmann, Toz, & Brandon, 2010). Therefore, the implementation of moral choices in games helps elicit an emotional response (for better or worse), which increases player engagement with the game.

Some may question whether or not players actually do behavior morally in games, especially in light of evidence of toxic behavior described in the previous sections. The answer to that question appears to be yes. Weaver and Lewis (2012) wanted to investigate how players go about making moral choices in video games, if they do. They had participants (n=75) complete a questionnaire on their level of moral reasoning and then had each participant play through the first act of Fallout 3, another open-ended game rife with moral choices. They found that most players made moral choices and their behavior towards non-player characters mirrored their responses to the morality questionnaire. In other words, they made decisions in game as if they actual interpersonal interactions. They also found that player enjoyment was not differentially increased by moral or immoral decisions (it increased similarly for both types of decisions) though those who made immoral decisions experienced more guilt (Weaver & Lewis, 2012), consistent with Hartmann et al.’s (2010) findings.

But do these findings mean that those who made immoral choices in games did so because they were, in turn, immoral? Not necessarily. Joeckel, Bowman, & Dogruel (2012) investigated the impact of morality salience on moral decision making in video games. They found that when the morality of choices were made very obvious, instances of immoral decisions went down. However, when it was less salient, decisions appeared more randomly distributed. When players are presented with problems that prime them to think morally, they act morally. However, if a moral situation does not present itself clearly as such and the player is not sufficiently primed, an immoral response would not be viewed as personal immorality, but rather as simply a continuation of the game experience (Joeckel, Bowman, & Dogruel, 2012).

Though speculative, morality in video games also provides other interesting areas of investigation for players. In these games, their behaviors have an immediate impact on how non-player characters interact with the player. Therefore, moral choices in video games could be used as safer environments for players to experiment with different behaviors and see an approximation of the social impact that behavior would have on others. In addition, it may be possible to introduce moral dilemmas, similar to those made popular by Kohlberg (see Kohlberg, 1981; Kohlberg & Hersh, 1977) in a virtual media to provide players with a more vivid experience of the dilemma and help foster moral growth. These are areas that remain relatively unstudied to this author’s knowledge. The concept of morality in video games has contributed to increasing player engagements with the games and more and more developers are releasing titles that include moral choices.

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So there you have it. There is a growing subfield of psychology investigating the effects of video games as a media and I hope to see the literature base continue to grow as the years go on. I am especially interested to see how the research on morality and moral choices in video games evolve over time. I, for one, always felt like a dick when I would choose the “evil” choices. It actually made it more difficult for me to complete games if I had decided to go the immoral route. What about you? Leave your comments below. That’s all for now.

See y’all next time!

References

Hartmann, T., Toz, E., & Brandon, M. (2010). Just a game? Unjustified virtual violence produces guilt in empathetic players. Media Psychology, 13, 339-363. DOI: 10.1080/15213269.2010.524912

Joeckel, S., Bowman, N. D., & Dogruel, L. (2012). Gut or game? The influence of moral institutions on decisions in video games. Media Psychology, 15, 460-485. DOI: 10.31080/15213269.2012.727218

Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on Moral Development, Vol. I: The Philosophy of Moral Development. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row.

Kohlberg, L. & Hersh, R. H. (1977). Moral development: A review of the theory. Theory Into Practice, 16(2), 53-59. DOI: 10.1080/00405847709542675

Oswald, C. A., Prorocok, C., & Murphy, S. M. (2014). The perceived meaning of the video game experience: An exploratory study. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 3(2), 110-126. DOI: 10.1037/a0033828

Weaver, A. J. & Lewis, N. (2012). Mirrored morality: An exploration of moral choice in video games. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 15(11), 610-614. DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2012.0235

• Gaming
• Morality
• Psychology
• Video Games