MORALITY PLAY: DESIGNING VIDEOGAMES FOR MORAL EXPERTISE DEVELOPMENT Dan Staines A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Humanities and Languages Faculty of Arts November, 2016 2 1 THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For my parents, Shirley and Robert Staines, whose ongoing support made this possible. Huge thanks to: Malcolm, Peter, Rachel, Eleanor, Wilks, Wildgoose, Lamotte, Griz, PT, Mari, Gab, and anyone else who helped me survive the Dark Times. And to Mordin, my cat, for being a constant source of joy and friendship. i CONTENTS Chapter I Introduction and Overview ......................... 1 1.1. Background ............................................ 1 1.2. Why is this important? ................................ 5 1.3. Overview and structure ................................ 6 1.4. Glossary and a note on terminology .................... 7 Chapter II Moral Psychology, Development, and Education ... 10 2.1. What is moral psychology and development? ............ 10 2.2. The philosophical roots of moral psychology .......... 12 2.3. Cognitive developmentalism: Piaget and Kohlberg ...... 23 2.4. Limitations of cognitive developmentalism ............ 35 2.5. Beyond Kohlberg ...................................... 41 2.6. Conclusion ........................................... 63 Chapter III Serious Games ................................. 65 3.1. What is a serious game? .............................. 65 3.2. What makes games attractive for education? ........... 67 3.3. What is the motivational process games trigger? ...... 71 3.4. How do instructional games affect learning outcomes? . 77 3.5. Limitations of the serious games literature .......... 82 3.6. Practical limitations of serious games ............... 86 3.7. The Lens of the Toy .................................. 90 3.8. Transformational Play ................................ 98 3.9. Conclusion .......................................... 106 Chapter IV Games for Moral Expertise Development ......... 111 4.1. Ethically notable games: classification/design ...... 111 4.2. Games for moral development: theoretical approaches . 125 4.3. Games for moral development: empirical approaches ... 130 4.4. Games for moral development: opportunities .......... 139 4.5. Games for moral expertise development: challenges ... 155 4.6. Conclusion .......................................... 161 Chapter V Morality Play and the Four Lenses ............... 162 5.1. Morality Play ....................................... 162 5.2. The Four Lenses ..................................... 170 5.3. Revolution .......................................... 181 5.4. Conclusion .......................................... 195 Chapter VI Conclusion ..................................... 197 5.1. Recap: key ideas and arguments ...................... 197 5.2. Concerns and questions .............................. 208 5.3. Future opportunities and concluding remarks ......... 213 Bibliography .............................................. 217 ii iii iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW The link between videogames and morality has been a hot topic for a long time now. From the release of Death Race (Exidy, 1976) all the way through to recent games like Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar North, 2013), the history of gaming is pockmarked with episodes of moral controversy. Legislators, lawyers, academics and community groups from all over the socio- political spectrum have at one time or another accused games of ethical bankruptcy. So familiar are these complaints that they could almost be called clichés: games are too violent; games train kids to be killers; games encourage social dysfunction – the list is as long as it is controversial. But what’s interesting is that in the rush to prove that games promote immorality, very few have stopped to wonder if they could do the exact opposite. What if a videogame could be used promote moral expertise? That is the central question I seek to address. It is my view that videogames are possessed of unique properties that render them especially suitable for promoting moral expertise. The purpose of my dissertation is therefore twofold: 1. Make the case that games are especially well-suited to promoting moral development, and moral expertise in particular. 2. Outline a model for developing games to promote moral expertise development. 1.1. BACKGROUND It doesn’t take a huge imaginative leap to envision a future in which games are employed in the service of character development. An increasing demand for training simulators, particularly in medical and military contexts, has reinvigorated interest in the educational potential of videogames (Squire, 2005). As a consequence, an informal coalition of developers, educators, and academics have formed what has become known as the serious games movement. As the name suggests, serious games are designed for more than just 1 entertainment. In addition to teaching-aids and training simulators, the genre includes games that seek to raise social awareness, promote a political agenda, or advertise goods and services. America’s Army (United States Army, 2002), Darfur is Dying (Take ACTION Games, 2006), and Full Spectrum Warrior (Pandemic, 2004) are all examples of popular serious games. So far as education goes, the key difference between serious games and traditional edutainment is that the former are often developed in accordance with the principles of effective pedagogy. In his excellent and influential What Videogames Have to Teach us About Literacy and Learning (2003), cognitive-scientist James Paul Gee outlines many of these principles explicitly, arguing that they are an intrinsic part of good game-design – serious or otherwise. According to Gee, good games naturally facilitate learning by delivering information as part of a complete contextual package (Gee, 2007, p. 55). Put simply, what that means is that good games don’t draw a distinction between theory and practice. When a person learns how to play a game, their skills and knowledge develop in a practical context and can be applied to achieve specific goals within it (Gee, 2004, p.68). If said goals are desirable, and in good games they usually are, then the process of learning becomes intrinsically motivating. You learn because you want to achieve, and you achieve because of what you learn. (Gee, 2003, p. 65) As Gee (2004, p. 7) and others have argued, policy-makers could stand to learn a great deal from videogames, especially in regard to the structure and content of school curricula. In recent years, the institution of public education has become increasingly focused on skill and drill study, where a student’s ability to memorise and regurgitate raw data determines their success in the classroom (Saywer, 2006, p. 1). But as demonstrated by videogames, and supported by numerous studies in cognitive science, people are much better at retaining and reasoning with information when it’s contextualised by practical experience. For example, consider this variation of the Wason Selection Task detailed in Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds (2006, pp. 274-5): 2 CLASSIC: You have a deck of cards, which, unlike regular playing cards, have a letter on one side and a number on the other. An experimenter removes four cards and places them in front of you as follows: D F 3 7 The following rule, which may be true or false, applies to these cards: If there is a D on one side of the card, then there is a 3 on the other side of the card. To decide whether the rule is true or false, which card or cards do you turn over? SOCIAL CONTRACT: You have been hired as a bouncer in a bar and you must enforce the following rule: If a person is drinking a beer, he or she must be over twenty-one years old. The cards below represent four people at the bar. One of the cards says what the person is drinking, and the other side of the card says how old the person is. Which cards do you have to turn over to ensure that the rule has been enforced? 20yr Beer 24yr Coke The correct answer for the first problem is D and 7. For the second one, it’s 20 and Beer. In terms of their logical structure, both problems are identical. But which one was easier to solve? If you’re like most people, your answer will be the second one and the reason for that is because it emulates familiar social conventions (Hauser, 2006, p. 276), and so appeals to the contextual nature of cognition. On the other hand, the first problem is harder because it consists of nothing but raw data. Devoid of any meaningful connection to lived experience, it exists in a vacuum outside the world in which our brains have evolved to function. To steal an analogy from Gee (2003, p. 102), asking people to learn and think in abstractions of this sort is like trying to learn how to play a videogame just by reading the manual. Yes, 3 you can understand the words and you might have a general idea of what you’re supposed to do, but unless you can marry that information to experience – either with the game itself or another game like it – then your chances of practical success remain slim. Coupled with research in neuroscience, this contextual conception of cognition has inspired cognitive scientists and psychologists to develop new theories of moral judgement and development (Lapsley & Narvaez, 2005). Contrary to the rule-and-rationality focused philosophies that have dominated Western ethics since the 16th Century, current thinking regards morality as a set of contextual and largely unconscious social skills (Churchland, 2001; Narvaez & Lapsley,