Can playing video games make you a ‘better’ person?

Dr Malcolm Ryan from the Department of Computing and Dr Paul Formosa from the Department of Philosophy.

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98 per cent of Australian households with children have at least one form of video game, and the content of these games is sometimes questioned.

A recent paper by Macquarie researchers challenges the concept that games are amoral spaces where actions are without ethical significance.

Dr Paul Formosa from the Department of Philosophy explains that artists across every medium engage audiences with challenging moral questions concerning topics of war, crime corruption, fidelity and the abuse of power. However, Formosa argues relatively few video games invite us to engage deeply with the morality of the worlds they depict or the behaviours they encourage us to adopt.

“Somewhere along the way, the idea that ‘it’s just a game’ has been used as a way of saying that ‘my behaviour here doesn’t matter because the purpose of gameplay is nothing more than winning or losing’,” Formosa says.

Co-author and senior lecturer in Game Design and Development, Dr Malcolm Ryan, says it is easy for players to adopt a pragmatic approach to optimising their gameplay outcomes and ignore the moral significance of their behaviour.

“What is interesting is when the designer encourages the player to make choices morally in spite of the inherent systems of the game,” Ryan notes.

“To take an example from the Grand Theft Auto series, we want to prompt the player to think ‘well I actually feel bad about running over the sex worker and taking her money and perhaps this is not something I should be doing.”

“To be clear, we aren’t advocating against these games, we are simply interested in expanding the scope of games to allow deeper, morally complex works – not to replace one with the other.”

Dr Formosa explains there has always been discussion and debate about whether playing violent video games can make you more violent which leads to the question: can playing violent video games make you a ‘worse’ person?

“Our research is more interested in looking at the inverse question: can playing morally engaging video games make you a ‘better’ person?”


Do you or your family members play video games regularly? What are your thoughts on this research?

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  1. The game Spec Ops: The Line explores this very well. At first it looks like a typical shoot-em-up, but then you’re forced into situations that show the devastating effects of your actions, yet the player will continue going forward, until the end when the character realises all the destruction he’s done. The game tells the player they could have stopped playing at any time, yet they didn’t. Why didn’t the player stop even after seeing the violence happening? Why do we want to win in the game despite any cost?

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