Understanding Moral Decision-Making in Video Games: A Focus Group Study

Moral dilemmas have become increasingly popular in video games, although it is still widely unknown why players might find them pleasurable, how they process dilemmas, and which factors affect the processing. Therefore, three different focus groups sessions with expert gamers (N = 16) were conducted. Gamers’ expressions of their experience with meaningful and morally relevant game situations were grouped for relevant topics. Topics are supported by direct quotations from participants of discussion groups, referring to up-to-date video game titles and presented together with respective theoretical assumptions. Results show that besides the game-defining theme of interactivity, statements can be grouped broadly into factors that describe why players engage or disengage in the first place (motivation) and factors that shape the moral interaction itself (influencing factors). In summary, our findings support the notion that moral-decision making in video games is a dynamic interplay between several game and user-dependent variables. Findings provide insights into players’ processing of moral dilemmas in video games, which also offers promising suggestions for future research using experimental setups.