TECH

Video games could make us better people

Addiction, violence, aggression, social withdrawal: Video games have been in the crosshairs for a litany of negative impacts. Researchers at Macquarie University, however, are working on the premise that video games can have positive impacts, too—that just as pilots use simulators to learn and hone their flight skills, people could use video games to develop their moral skills.

"Some of the same sorts of moral skills we use in real life can be used in games, and games can interact with those skills and develop them. That's really what we've been looking at in our research," says Dr. Paul Formosa, senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy.

"A lot of the media around video games is pretty negative and a lot of the research, too, has been on the negative effects—meta-analysis shows there is some real-life impact of video games, but it's not huge and it's not shown in every single study—but we're far more interested in the positive effects, which are much less studied."

Formosa is part of a multidisciplinary team that, based on its theoretical findings, is building a video game for experiments examining how different design features can engage various moral skills.

Those features include timers and how they affect decision-making, and whether so-called virtue meters, which award points for good deeds and vice versa, instrumentalize morality so that players seek to maximize the meter rather than engage with the moral issues.

Video Games Could Make Us Better Decision Makers...While many people play video games for fun, new research suggests that they could actually help us to be better at making decisions.

A recent study from Georgia State University compared response times and brain activity in people who played a lot of video games and people who played them only a little during a decision-making task.

The study involved 47 college-age participants, 28 of whom played video games for at least five hours per week over the last two years, and 19 of whom played less than an hour per week. These two groups were referred to as "video game players" and "non-video game players."

The games played by video game players were all types that require quick responses, such as first-person shooters and real-time strategy games.

All participants were given the same task, which involved deciding which way different colored dots were moving on a screen, and pressing left or right buttons on a controller with their thumbs. The participants were asked to respond as quickly and accurately as possible.

It was found that, on average, video game players were faster by 190 milliseconds and 2% more accurate than non-video game players. Brain scanning during the task also showed more activity in three regions of the gamers' brains compared to the non-gamers' brains.

According to the researchers, these results show that video game playing can change the brain, and might improve processes for sensation, perception and directing action, which can help to improve decision making skills.

The researchers also noted that the results showed no "trade-off" between speed and accuracy among participants who played video games, adding that this shows video game playing could be a good method of cognitive training for making decisions.

"Video games are played by the overwhelming majority of our youth more than three hours every week," said lead researcher Dr. Mukesh Dhamala. "But the beneficial effects on decision-making abilities and the brain are not exactly known."

"Our work provides some answers on that," he said.

'It's important not to have a moral panic'...Formosa says the research has employed moral psychology to pinpoint four moral skills (see below) that people need in real life and that games can engage.

Many commercial games already engage these skills. Examples include "Papers, Please," in which the player is an immigration officer checking papers on the border of a totalitarian state; "The Walking Dead," which holds the player accountable for their life-and-death choices and asks them to justify their actions; and "This War of Mine," where you're a civilian stuck in a war zone having to make all sorts of tough choices to survive.

"Fortnite"—the shoot-'em-up game du jour—does not, in case you were wondering, engage moral skills. But Formosa does not have a problem with that, and he emphasizes that researchers are not suggesting violent games should not be played.

"It's important not to have a moral panic about games in general because they are not a homogeneous group," he says.

"People play them for all sorts of reasons. Some games require a lot more focus and engagement than others. A lot of people play short games on their phones for 5 or 10 minutes, "Candy Crush" and so forth, which are not supposed to be deep engagements; they are something to pass the time, and for some people they can relieve stress. So short instances of gaming like that can also have positive effects.

"We're not saying that games like 'Fortnite' shouldn't be played. They have their role, but so do these other sorts of ethical games."

Gamer stereotypes are out the window...Formosa says more than 50% of people play games regularly. Many of them are women, and the average age is increasing, sitting right now in the mid-30s.

"People have this image of the gamer as this teenage boy, but that's very inaccurate," he says.

"When you look on the train, the 50-year-old woman is playing games on the mobile phone just as much as the 13-year-old boy; she may not be pulling out the Xbox when she gets home, but these are still forms of games."

Dr. Malcolm Ryan, senior lecturer for games design and development in Macquarie's Department of Computing, is leading the design of the experimental game, which Formosa describes as Australian noir: "It's set in the 1940s and '50s, in a town cinema where there's going to be a fire and a whole bunch of difficult moral judgments people will have to engage with."

Writing the dialogue is Associate Professor Jane Messer, from the Creative Writing program in the Department of English, while Dr. Stephanie Howarth, postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science, has brought expertise in moral psychology to the project.

The moral skills the experimental game will seek to engage include:

Moral sensitivity, which is about being sensitive to the very presence of moral situations, which "we can often overlook or just ignore or not see," Formosa says. "You can see this in games where sometimes people might not even notice the moral issues at stake."

Moral judgment. "Often games will have big moral judgments where you have to choose between A and B, or decide whether you sacrifice some people to save these other people, and that's a really useful way to practice and develop your moral judgment without real-world stakes."

Moral focus, which is about prioritizing moral concerns when they conflict with self-interest.

Moral action. This involves implementing moral judgment, which "might require a fair bit of perseverance or excellent communication skills or a lot of emotional maturity."

"What we're interested in is different ways games can be designed so they can engage with these different moral skills," Formosa says.

"We want to look at why some design choices might be better than others, and ultimately, hopefully, that would get incorporated into commercial games."

Provided by Macquarie University