The digital game morality experience

This thesis sought to examine the way people process morality-related issues while playing digital games, and to offer a possible explanation of how people are able to enjoy doing things in digital games that they would find morally reprehensible to do in the real world. Digital games are an important cultural phenomenon that seems to only be growing in popularity. At the same time, the often violent in-game behavior that people engage in while they are playing these games have caused some to be concerned that digital game players may emulate such behaviors in the real world. However, little has been done to discover why it is that these games are so enjoyable and desirable, which is what this thesis was written to explore. Using affective-disposition theory and anti-hero research as a baseline, the study attempts to adapt current media enjoyment theories so that they can be useful in describing digital game enjoyment. It uses the Digital Game Experience Model and the limited-capacity model in tandem with the media enjoyment literature and proposes that enjoyment theories may be applicable, but only in one of the six frames of digital game involvement represented in the DGEM -- the narrative. It goes on to propose that people are able to enjoy the immoral by focusing on other frames of game involvement offered by the DGEM, such as the performative or tactical frames.;To operationalize involvement within a specific frame of the digital game experience, the limited-capacity model's concept of cognitive resources was used. The idea was that these resources tend to be distributed evenly among the frames of involvement in digital games under normal circumstances. However, in the case of digital games that can potentially produce moral dissonance, it is suggested that people are able to maintain enjoyment in spite of the predictions of ADT because their cognitive resources are reallocated to areas of the gameplay experience in which morality is not a consideration -- to frames of involvement other than the narrative frame. As secondary-task reaction-times are a proven way to measure cognitive resources allocated to specific constructs, some secondary tasks were designed to elicit processing of the narrative, to be administered while participants were actively engaged in playing a digital game.;Thus, a between-subjects design was used that used secondary-reaction time tests to gauge cognitive resource allocation. Before playing the game, participants were briefed using either a morally justified or a morally unjustified narrative background (the manipulation) to contextualize their actions within the game. They were then asked to play a game for 10 minutes with the sole mission of killing as many people in the game as possible. In both conditions, the mission was the same -- only the narrative reason for why they were killing the people was manipulated. Participants were also instructed prior to beginning that during the game they were to periodically respond to prompts from an adjacent computer which asked questions that were intended to elicit narrative processing. It was hypothesized that those in the unjustified condition would have allocated less cognitive resources to the narrative-frame, and thus would take longer to respond to these narrative-based tasks.;The data did not yield any statistically significant results for the effect of the moral backdrop manipulation on the reaction times to the narrative-based tasks, and the non-significant results were in the opposite direction than that predicted. The one exception was for the first of the narrative-tasks to be administered, in which there was a relationship that approached significance, again in the opposite direction of predicted results. Enjoyment of the game was the same in both conditions, as was predicted. Another significant relationship was found between the actual response given to the narrative-tasks and the reaction times to the tasks, regardless of which condition the participants were in. These results and their potential implications are then discussed, and further avenues of research are suggested.