The Virtual Guilt of Doing Wrong in Games Makes Players Better Real-Life Humans

It's OK to join the Thieve's Guild. Go forth and conquer New Vegas with Caesar's Legion, enact sadistic tortures on heroes in a dungeon of your own design, plant a payload of C4 on a public street, or maybe just destroy all humans(!) in the most unambiguous sense. Playing as the bad guy/villain is a time-honored tradition in video games and the evolution of gaming has progressed to what could be considered a post-bad guy world where "good" and "bad" are rendered as deeply unsettled notions. Characters now are so often either becoming good or becoming bad (Red Dead Redemption, say), while those ecstatic moral positions exist only relatively: a victorious Legion, after all, brings stability to a dangerous desert, while Grand Theft Auto exists as an elaborate troll of the very notion of objective badness. Morals in gaming are a tricky thing (as they are in life, if usually more subtly).

I won't attempt to summarize the body of research and opinion about how violence and/or morality in video games effects the IRL behavior of players. The subject is pretty much fraught from every imaginable angle and barely settled. New research out from the University of Buffalo adds to an interesting and increasingly well-supported suggestion, however: being bad in games makes players feel real-world guilt about their in-game behavior. Players come out of sketchy virtual situations more "morally sensitive." "This may, as it does in real life, provoke players to engage in voluntary behavior that benefits others,” notes lead author Matthew Grizzard in a summary of the study, which is published (behind a paywall) in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking. So, the suggestion is that not only is amoral in-game activity harmless, it might also be beneficial to society.

This conclusion rests on previous findings within sociology/social psychology that when humans feel guilt about some real-world behavior (or lab-simulated real-world behavior, rather) they will convert that feeling into actual prosocial behavior. A quick survey reveals a 2003 New Mexico State University study finding that feelings of guilt could be used to push real-world cooperation, suggesting that guilt may be used as "'information' about the future costs of uncooperative strategy." A 2014 study, meanwhile, found that guilty feelings increased giving allocations by young children in the dictator game. One peculiar study released in February gave life to the underlying metaphor, finding that participants harboring guilty feelings that washed their hands were less likely to engage in prosocial behavior after cleansing than guilty-feeling individuals that hadn't washed their hands.

So, we might look at our villianesque gamers as individuals in search of purification, washing clean the virtual tyranny. The current study differentiated guilt into five specific domains: care/harm, fairness/reciprocity, loyalty, respect for authority, and purity/sanctity. Said domains were identified as specific features in different games, making it possible to assign one or more of these categories to reported feelings of guilt.

Interestingly, the prosocial reciprocity (cleansing) wasn't consistent across the catagories. "We found that after a subject played a violent video game, they felt guilt and that guilt was associated with greater sensitivity toward the two particular domains they violated—those of care/harm and fairness/reciprocity,” said Grizzard. For reference, note that the first of those categories indicates things like abuse and cruelty, while the second indicates injustice.

“Our findings suggest that emotional experiences evoked by media exposure can increase the intuitive foundations upon which human beings make moral judgments,” Grizzard said. “This is particularly relevant for video-game play, where habitual engagement with that media is the norm for a small, but considerably important group of users.”

It's not that quite easy, however, for a couple of reasons. The first is pretty simple: game authors increasingly prefer ambiguity, rather than clear-cut moral violations. The Call of Duty protagonist might have participated full-on in the fucking up of a Russian airport, but they were also supposed to be deep undercover, acting in the interest of still a greater, more peaceful good. You could even call the scene self-purifying. It might be interesting to see such a study replicated in the shrewdly-written moral universes of modern blockbusters. What if any behavior is being fostered then?

What if game authors didn't allow moral outs, instead making their violence brutal and unambiguous? In Call of Duty, the player-character would just be a heinous, morally-barren individual. This absence of polite hedging, a sort of just going for it, would help, and Grizzard agrees, pointing to results from the 1990s National Television Violence Study showing that real-world aggressive behavior is most likely to be fostered by media that paints the perpetrators of violence as "good" or justified.

"I think that sanitizing the violence by justifying the means is probably more harmful than if game designers 'just went for it," at least for adult audiences," Grizzard said in an email to Motherboard. "Virtual behaviors in video games that the player has a difficult time justifying in his/her own mind are likely the kinds of video game action that would encourage reflection. As such, these types of behaviors have a chance to make the player think about why what he did is wrong and what the correct actions might be. In this manner, video games can act as a moral sandbox."

The study begs mention of a related personality trait: guilt-proneness. This is just what it sounds: "a predisposition to experience negative feelings about personal wrongdoing, even when the wrongdoing is private." People that are highly guilt prone are less likely to do things that would cause guilt in the very first place, like blow up civilians in a virtual village, and those that aren't might be expected to shoot the shit out of whatever moves (think of Frank Underwood in House of Cards), but also get into IRL immorality, like selling subprime mortgages. So, those that might be most susceptible to feeling guilt about some video game and becoming a better human because of it are less likely to play the game in the very first place.

"I think it is probably true that players would attempt to avoid games that would make them feel guilty, if they could anticipate it," Grizzard said, but he added that it's quite likely that some large portion of people with this trait might go into morally-fucked gaming scenarios without prior warning. "Sometimes players won't really know what lies ahead for them in a game and whether the actions that they are asked to complete adhere with their own personal standards of morality. In fact, players might be more likely to violate their own personal standards when a competing personal goal comes into conflict with their moral standards, for example completing a game that they are attempting to beat."

So, the real-life winning impulse bests virtual goodness. And "to the extent that the actions games ask them to complete differ from their own 
personal standards regarding just and moral behaviors," Grizzard said, "they are likely to feel guilt."