Boffins explore impact of game morality meters

Researchers from Macquarie University have built a computer game designed to test the impact of morality meters on players making moral choices in games.

The narrative game The Great Fire is about an usher in a cinema in regional Australia in the 1940s who is confronted by a murderous psychopath.

The game presents players with multiple choices which affect the outcome, including some which are moral decisions. These range from black and white decisions, such as whether or not to kick a dog, to ‘trolley problems’ where the player decides whether to kill some people to save others.

Each choice is labelled with a score of good or evil, but the moral impact of a choice is not always clear. The researchers hypothesised that presenting players with a moral ranking of each choice would affect their selection, according to Dr Malcolm Ryan, course director of the Games Design and Development Program in School of Computing at Macquarie University.

“Our hypothesis was that under that circumstance, players might choose to steal, but we were relieved to find telling people that stealing money is good doesn’t change their response… Although there will always be about 10% who will choose to do it anyway,” he said.

On the other hand, more ambiguous choices did appear to be affected by the morality meter, Ryan said.

“Morality meters, that indicate how good or evil your avatar is, have been around computer games since 1985 when Richard Garriott pioneered the idea in Ultima IV,” he said.

“But until now there has been no empirical data on which to base discussion of their impact on the attractiveness of games, or their effect on players.”

Further research in this area will focus on the impact of knowing what others think in morally ambiguous situations, as well as taking biometric measures to explore how deeply players are thinking about a decision, he said.

Image credit: iStock.com/Parradee Kietsirikul