My argument is that games can help provide the experiences necessary for successful moral pedagogy, and they can do so more effectively than books, plays, and films. For while other media can give you moral exposure, only games can give you moral interaction. Only games can drop you into the middle of a moral quagmire and make you struggle your way out of it. Only games let you conduct ethical experiments in a safe environment free of messy real-world consequences.

Of course, not just any game will do. Just as playing Doom is unlikely to turn you into a homicidal psychopath, it probably won’t make you Mother Theresa either. In order to trigger what education theorists call transference, wherein skills developed in one domain are applied in another, a complement of tacit and explicit links between domains needs to be established. Basically, you need to understand how A applies to B – how, for example, the play about burning heathens resembles your own experience in that area, or how what happened in Nazi Germany somehow relates to every political discussion ever. To be morally effective, games need to simulate the experience of moral judgement with enough fidelity to trigger that cross-over from fiction to reality.

Truth be told, there are already a number of serious and commercial games that come close to doing exactly that. Planescape: Torment, Deus Ex, the Ultimas, the KOTORs, and the Fallouts all attempt in one way or another to engage our moral faculties – and those are just off the top of my head. Admittedly, none of these games would suffice for use in a formal moral education, but there’s no reason to expect that they should. After all, they weren’t designed to teach ethics.     

But the games I’m thinking of would be – they would need to be. And just as importantly, they would need to be deployed as part of a broader moral education package. See, when critics like Jack Thompson point out that games like Full Spectrum Warrior are used to train soldiers – and are therefore teaching our KIDS to be KILLERS – what they usually neglect to mention is that in the military, games and simulations like FSW form a small portion of a much larger curriculum. It’s not as though the army simply sits recruits in front of an Xbox for a few hours before handing out green berets. The literature makes it quite clear that in most cases, games require considerable pedagogical support to function properly in formal education.  

It all goes back to what I was saying about transference: activities like lectures and group discussions give your brain the extra kick it needs to translate what you’ve learned in the game into real world skills. Incidentally, this is one of the many reasons why people like our good friend Jack are talking crap when they claim that violent games can warp the moral values of otherwise healthy individuals. Games are simply not sophisticated enough to produce such dramatic cognitive changes by themselves. Frankly, I doubt they ever will be.

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