Morality in video games: Gut or Game?

Over the last week, we've posted a few commentaries on potential pro-social influences of otherwise anti-social media content - including the notions of Appreciation and Disinterest. Today's post will focus on the role of moral intuitions in the processing and playing of video games. 

A scene from Heavy Rain for the PS3 (Sony)

Morality. Historically, the concept of morality has been a central focus of media research. In the early 20th century, the Payne Fund’s studies on children and movie content examined the moral lessons adolescents took from the cinema (cf. Lowery & DeFleur, 1995). Later, Wertham (1954) argued that comic books of the time were full of misogyny, sexual perversion, and graphic violence that had the potential to corrupt the pliable morality of children. Indeed, these views are not inventions of the modern era, as history is rife with examples of book burnings and other censure at the hands of governments, monarchs, and religious orders alike. In short, the belief that morally-questionable content serves only to corrupt individual moral codes has persisted. Indeed, considerations of morality has been the center of many of our classic theories in entertainment research, from understanding specific-level individual character judgments (Zillmann & Cantor, 1976) to broader audience patterns of media consumption (Gans, 1974; Zillmann, 2000).

Likewise, morality has been a focal point for video game theory and research. As interactive spaces, games are thought to be particularly adept at allowing gamers to encounter, learn and even rehearse reactions to a variety of different emotional states, including those concerned with morality (Grodal, 2000; Johnson, 2010). But how does an individual’s morality explain their motivation to enact (or not) the models of morally-questionable behaviors experienced in video games? Emerging research applying moral foundations theory (Haidt & Joseph, 2004) suggest that innate moral judgments may be key to this process. For example, Tamborini and colleagues report that variance in individual moral intuitions is predictive of how they appraise and eventually react to violent media content (Tamborini, Eden, Bowman, Grizzard, & Lachlan, 2012). Extending this research to video games, Bowman and colleagues found initial evidence to suggest that moral intuitions are not only predictive of gamers’ appraisals of content as moral or immoral, but also predictive of in-game responses to this content. Specifically, their research found that when a video game presented gamers with a choice to commit a moral violation, gamers who felt strongly about the particular situation (i.e. inflicting harm on an innocent) would go to great lengths to avoid the violation. Conversely, gamers who did not feel particularly strong about the situation – that is, gamers who did not have a strong intuitive reaction to the moral presentation – were inclined to make seemingly-random decisions to violate or not in an effort to play with different outcome scenarios (Joeckel, Bowman, & Dogruel, in press - see presentation below). This observed “gut” (moral intuition-based) or “game” (experience-based) reaction is in line with current theorizing on the function of morality in entertainment media, specifically Raney’s (2010) notion of moral disengagement – that we actively suspend our moral code in order to maximize media enjoyment. Indeed, the research expands this line of reasoning further to suggest that while we initially suspend morality in favor of enjoyment, there are aspects of our moral codes that are likely non-negotiable.

Adolescents, Morality and Interactive Entertainment: The influence of moral salience on actions and entertainment experience in interactive media.

Of course, it can be argued that repeated exposure to moral violations might weaken our resolve, particularly if games reward us for committing moral violations. In his model of moral intuitions and media entertainment, or MIME, Tamborini (2011) argues that moral intuitions are initially fostered from our non-mediated cultural environment and reinforced or manipulated through long-term exposure to media content. While popular media generally adheres to rather than violates societal-level moral standards (cf. Klapper, 1960), producers will occasionally break these expectations to surprise audiences; this is particularly common in video games, where production norms associated with what is an is not acceptable content are different than in more traditional forms of media. As Tamborini and colleagues have found evidence suggesting that entertaining media content can result in shifts in moral judgment (Tamborini, Weber, Eden, Bowman, & Grizzard, 2010), a logical extension of this research may be to examine long-term influences on moral intuition stemming from video game play. The popularity of “M”-rated content is apparent, and as result we might consider the dominant narratives in games such as Grand Theft Auto to be particularly rewarding of anti-social over pro-social behavior (Bowman, in press). From this, an area of research ripe for investigation  the role of repeated exposure to scripts shifting witnessed decisions form the “game” category to the “gut” category. Assuming moral intuitions to play an important role in how we  evaluate, enjoy, and respond to anti-social models in video games, such an approach should provide a more robust explanation as to the mechanism behind the connection between morally-questionable content and observed media effect.