Papers by Mitchell McEwan
Behaviour & Information Technology, 2023
The Gamer’s Dilemma challenges us to justify the moral difference between enacting virtual murder... more The Gamer’s Dilemma challenges us to justify the moral difference between enacting virtual murder and virtual child molestation in video games. The Dilemma relies for its argumentative force on the claim that there is an intuitive moral difference between these acts, with the former intuited as morally acceptable and the latter as morally unacceptable. However, to date, there has been no empirical investigation of the claim that people really do have these moral intuitions. Our study aims to fill this gap. To explore these issues, we developed an experimental survey study in which participants were asked to reflect on imaginary video game scenarios as part of a 2 (undertake virtual murder or molestation) X 2 (against an adult or child) X 2 (in a high or low realism virtual environment) factorial design. We found that there was a significant difference between people’s views about virtual murder and virtual molestation. Whether the virtual act was performed against an adult or child was non-significant in most conditions, whereas whether it was performed in a high or low realism virtual environment was significant in most conditions. Gender did not impact these results, whereas perceived gaming experience, hours of video game play per week, and integrity did. These results help us to better understand the intuitions underlying the Gamer’s Dilemma and the factors that impact them, as well as provide an empirical grounding for future discussions of the Dilemma and the ethics of virtual actions more broadly.
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Papers by Mitchell McEwan