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Measuring morality in videogames research

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Abstract

There has been a recent surge of research interest in videogames of moral engagement for entertainment, advocacy and education. We have seen a wealth of analysis and several theoretical models proposed, but experimental evaluation has been scarce. One of the difficulties lies in the measurement of moral engagement. How do we meaningfully measure whether players are engaging with and affected by the moral choices in the games they play? In this paper, we survey the various standard psychometric instruments from the moral psychology literature and discuss how they might be applied in the evaluation of games.

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Notes

  1. For a more comprehensive catalogue of over 300 measures used in behavioural ethics, see Agle et al. (2014).

  2. While we use the term “Evaluation Task” to describe instruments like the DIT, they are often referred to in the literature (e.g. Thoma 2014) as measuring “recognition data”. We use the former because it is the least ambiguous of the two and, we believe, most accurately captures the nature of the described instruments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Malcolm Ryan

  2. Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Paul Formosa

  3. Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Stephanie Howarth

  4. Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

    Dan Staines

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  1. Malcolm Ryan
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  2. Paul Formosa
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  4. Dan Staines
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Ryan, M., Formosa, P., Howarth, S. et al. Measuring morality in videogames research. Ethics Inf Technol 22, 55–68 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-019-09515-0

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