How moral are you when playing video games?

Researchers have developed their own computer game to examine the effectiveness of metres that indicate the morality of players' decisions.

Two papers published by researchers at Macquarie University reveal that the majority of us disregard the metre when a moral decision is clear, but use it when the decision is morally ambiguous. And approximately 10% of us will do anything to win.

You are playing the narrative computer game The Great Fire. Frankie, an usher in a regional Australian cinema during the 1940s, is confronted by a murderous psychopath.

Along the way, players must make decisions that impact the game's progression and outcome. Some decisions are black-and-white, such as whether to kick a dog, while others are "trolley problems," such as whether you will kill or harm someone if it saves others.

Each decision is assigned a score of good or evil, and your overall morality is displayed on a metre at the top of the screen. The moral repercussions of a decision are not always obvious, however, based on its score. It is sometimes even counterintuitive. Do you steal money from a homeless person who could help you? What occurs if the moral score insists that this is a positive action?

Dr. Malcolm Ryan, course director of the Games Design and Development Programme in the School of Computing at Macquarie University, explains, "Our hypothesis was that under such conditions, players might choose to steal." "However, we were relieved to discover that telling people that stealing money is acceptable does not alter their response, Although there will always be approximately 10% who choose to do it regardless."

THE GREAT GAME

He developed The Great Fire with his longtime research partner Professor Paul Formosa, co-director of the Macquarie University Ethics & Agency Research Centre and Head of Philosophy, to study such issues. They worked with colleagues like writer Dr. Jane Messer and cognitive psychologist Dr. Stephanie Howarth to build a fully functional computer game with course code they could change.

"Richard Garriott introduced morality metres in Ultima IV in 1985." Dr. Ryan. But until now, there has been no empirical data on their effect on game attractiveness or players.

ENTERTAINMENT AND EDUCATION

Dr. Ryan values this work for many reasons. I prioritise game entertainment. I want to improve them as a designer, not just because they are fun, but because I want to see them become like more mature works of art and literature, able to deal with serious morality.”

He says moral education and awareness apply. “Games simulate moral situations and ask what is right.”

The research involving The Great Fire has already generated two papers. The first, published in the journal Games and Culture in January last year, was qualitative, exploring the feelings of players and their responses to the morality meter. It showed a difference between players who made choices simply to maximise their morality score, and others who viewed the meter as some sort of moral guide.

A second paper published earlier this year in the Computers in Human Behaviour provides the first quantitative data on morality meters. The results show that the meter is generally ignored when a moral choice is straightforward, but it can influence decisions when the choice is more morally ambiguous.

The team is conducting research on how knowing what others think affects morally ambiguous situations. Do we follow the majority if we know how they will act?

The Department of Computing is also building a Games User Research Lab to measure biometrics like skin conductance and eye blink rate while subjects play computer games. Malcolm Ryan says blink rate can indicate how deeply you are thinking about something. “These biometrics will show us players' moment-by-moment experience.”

“I will run a workshop at the Digital Games Research Association conference in June in Seville, Spain,” he says. The session will be online. The researchers are also collaborating with a local game developer on an ethical decision-making game.

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