Moral Games: What are the relationships between computer games and moral attitudes?

Software	None
Covers	Gaming culture, computer ethics, moral psychology
Skills Required	Interest in computer gaming, interest in computer ethics
Challenge	Conceptual ???? Technical ? Programming

Brief Description

Computer games involving violence and behaviour that would be morally wrong in the real world provoke a lot of concern, sometimes amounting to moral panic. Some people (usually ones who don't play computer games or have any contact to gaming culture) worry that experience of envisioned brutality and dubious moral choices within a game may coarsen or desensitize the players and make it more likely that they will do bad things in real life. And there is some evidence that this happens to some extent.

But what relationships are there between that beliefs, attitudes and behaviour that players have within games, and that particular games might encourage or require, with the beliefs, attitudes and behaviour that the same players have when getting on with their non-computational lives? Many games involve fighting against human opponents or computer generated enemies, where the scenario might involve extreme but imaginary violence, but the players are simply playing a game against each other voluntarily and within agreed rules. The relationship to real life gets a lot closer and a lot more complicated in MMORGs and games where players have the choice to compete or collaborate, be honest or deceive, or engage in productive or criminal behaviour.

Doing worthwhile research on whether computer games actually exert a causal influence on the behaviour of players outside the game would be difficult and almost certainly beyond the means of someone doing a BSc or MSc project. And it would be wise to be sceptical that any such influence would be there to be found. However there are other interesting questions to ask.

Approaches could include: looking at how players themselves see the differences between the decisions they make within games and the decisions they might make in real life; looking at how players think they should value the welfare of different kinds of game characters in different games and other players playing the games; looking at what people think the limits are on thinking 'this is what we're meant to do in the game - of course it's alright'; looking at what qualitative differences there are in how people think about moral choices or moral issues within games; looking at the relationship between personality and moral attitudes and what people choose to do within games. A rather different project could focus on people's beliefs about the interaction between games and other people's moral beliefs and attitudes.

Resources

The place to start is with a paper marshalling a lot of evidence for an influence of games on behaviour:
Greitemayer, T. & Mügge, D.O. (2014). Video Games Do Affect Social Outcomes: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Effects of Violent and Prosocial Game Play. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40, 578-589.

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