Arguing for False Moral Dilemmas in Games

Abstract

How can single-player video games morally engage their audience? Role-playing games with moral systems have been especially criticized for neutralizing moral engagement, while now classics such as Papers, Please (Pope 2013), Spec Ops: The Line (Yäger 2013), and The Walking Dead (Telltale 2012) have received much praise for fostering it. This is because moral engagement has been mostly modelled on the characteristics of true moral dilemmas, which prevent the player from adopting an "instrumental perspective" (Staines et al. 2019). This paper problematizes the true moral dilemma model by revisiting morally engaging games Papers, Please and The Walking Dead. Thanks to a virtue ethics perspective, it defends the value of false, biased, and irresolvable dilemmas that exercise the player's ways of being in the face of difficult circumstances.