Moral themes are commonly explored in video games developed for teenagers and adults. It makes sense since teenagers are developing conventional moral reasoning, and adults are developing post-conventional moral reasoning. Gamers, writers, and narrative designers want to explore moral concepts. However, there are effective and ineffective ways to approach this.

How Moral Reasoning is Developed

Simply put, people develop morality when they encounter situations that require evaluation, judgment, and action that have consequences. So, you walk by an alley and see a person being mugged. In that moment, you must evaluate the situation, judge the situation, actions, and potential outcomes, make an action, and face the consequences of your action or inaction. Even if you haven’t been in this situation, you probably have preconceived notions about what kind of person does specific actions in this situation. This is because indirect exposure—such as discussion, thought, and watching someone else—also plays into developing moral reasoning.

Crafting Moral Experiences

Since exposure is necessary to develop moral reasoning, the best way to explore morality is also through exposure. However, the form of exposure used is pivotal.

Due to the unique nature of video games as interactive media, we have to consider direct and indirect exposure in a different manner. Obviously, a scenario like the Trolley Problem—where a train trolley is going to hit and kill 4 people, or someone can switch the tracks to make the trolley hit only 1 person—would be unethical to expose someone to where actual human lives are at stake. However, video games give us a unique opportunity to explore such scenarios without risking any lives. In the context of video games, we can look at such a simulation as direct exposure since the player must go through evaluation, judgment, and action. Indirect exposure would be watching a character go through the simulation because the weight of the decision or action is removed from the player.

Indirect Exposure

Indirect exposure can be used to showcase moral experiences and ideas. However, they tend to fail at making someone question any moral implications; rather, they invoke a response based on the person’s already developed morality. While indirect exposure does play into developing moral reasoning, the person’s already developed moral reasoning will be the main contributor. This is why people will complain about games and films trying to force ideals and moral beliefs on consumers. The people complaining about it already have developed certain morals and are being indirectly exposed to morals that do not align or work with their already developed morals.

Direct Exposure

Direct exposure is how we get our players to think deeply about the moral implications of certain actions. For example, the Call of Duty series is well-known for depicting morally questionable actions and scenes. In one game, Captain Price uses a chemical weapon to interrogate an enemy combatant for time-sensitive information. In another, Captain Price injects an enemy combatant with a truth serum to get time-sensitive information. In the latter, the player character immediately confronts Captain Price about it. However, neither scenario had the player perform the actions or even have the choice to perform the actions. Instead, the player is forced to watch. Neither scenario had anywhere close to the morality-questioning impact of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 mission No Russian, where several players reported freezing upon realizing that they were about to open fire on unarmed civilians in the name of gaining the trust of the enemy to attempt to stop more mass causality events.

For most people, the scenarios I just outlined are not comparable events: using chemicals on known enemy combatants vs. gunning down unarmed civilians. However, both scenarios challenge the morality of, “the ends justify the means,” and there is no denying the latter had a stronger impact on players.

We do not always need to force our players to perform specific actions to invoke moral thought. Most of the time, giving the player a choice is better. When a player is provided a choice before performing an action, they must think through their decision and deal with the consequences. While No Russian had an immense impact on players, providing players with choice invokes deeper reasoning, which is ultimately what we want to do when exploring morality.

Wrap Up

Morality is frequently explored in video games. However, it is not always explored in an impactful manner. While watching characters perform actions can make a player think about the moral implications, the player’s predeveloped morality will have a much stronger influence on the player’s thoughts. To get players to think about the moral implications in a deeper manner and possibly question or change their morality, our games need to be designed and developed to have the player perform the actions and preferably make decisions on what actions they will perform.