Morality Part 1: Believability in video games

Last week, I discussed violence in video games and the effects it can have on the player. But mainstream video games incorporate violence as one small part of an overarching immersive experience. Like any action movie or dramatic television show, immersion is the key to entertaining the consumer, and violence is one way to grab the audience’s attention. But to throw the player into a violent video game with no context would not provide a captivating or enjoyable experience. There needs to be motivation for the acts the player is committing, and morality comes into play. If a player is killing plain enemies left and right with no back story or reason for doing so, they will likely become bored and lose interest. But if they are given a purpose, like saving humanity from aliens or wiping out a group of terrorists, their virtual violence becomes justifiable and they will become more invested in the game.

For the next two weeks, I’d like to delve into the topic of morality in video games, using a scholarly article as a guide. “It’s Okay to Shoot a Character: Moral Disengagement in Violent Video Games,” by Tilo Hartmann and Peter Vorderer, examines the concept of morality in games, and tests the researchers’ hypotheses in two experiments. But for now I’d like to focus on the idea behind moral choices and ethics in video games, and discuss their scientific results later.

A wide range of games today revolve around the concept of being able to influence your character’s decisions and make ethical choices. Games like Mass Effect keep a tally of how often your avatar is kind to others or acts like a jerk, and over time the way you treat others will affect how they treat you. Non-player characters may either praise or spurn you, based on your previous actions and attitude. Morality plays a huge part in the recent hit series Bioshock, where you are given the choice of either rescuing or “harvesting” zombie-like little girls you encounter throughout the game. Rescuing them restores them to normal but gives little monetary reward, while “harvesting” them kills them off-screen and nets you more resources. How you handle the “little sisters” not only affects the ending of the game, but how much power you can acquire as you play through it.

Making characters believable is necessary to the immersion the player experiences. If you don’t care about the characters you are either helping or killing, morality becomes meaningless and the entertainment value will rapidly decrease. Hartmann and Vorderer make note of the many ways in which designers create characters in games that help us suspend our disbelief and become engrossed in a game’s plot and action. There are certain visual cues that game designers can implement into their characters to “provoke automatic social responses.” These include things like blinking, breathing, display of emotion (especially with the face), and natural vocal tones. Individually, these may seem like pointlessly small details, but when combined into the final product of a virtual character, they take on a more “real” existence that players can connect with.

As Hartmann and Vorderer write, “if the media stimulus is well designed and displays social cues appropriately, it takes effort to recall that a character ‘is not real,’ because automatic social perceptions suggest otherwise.” If a player was constantly being reminded that they were playing a game, then enjoyment would suffer and the player would feel indifferent towards the events unfolding as they play. So it may enhance a player’s satisfaction to think of the avatars they encounter as “real social entities rather than artificial objects.” Believability is what keeps a player interested and engaged, just as suspending disbelief during a movie makes the film more enjoyable and compelling. Next week, I’ll talk about how morality comes into play once a gamer realizes that they might be doing harm to characters that almost seem real.