Moreover, any justified criticism will also apply to other forms of entertainment. We will argue that most, but not all, common criticisms of VVGs are unjustified. Since VVGs have been picked out as especially bad, we want to investigate whether it is justified to single them out for criticism. Hence, the popular sentiment seems to be that there must be something morally bad about these games. For the uninitiated it may be inexplicable why anyone would enjoy what is happening on screen. They depict gory, brutal, and gratuitous violence as entertainment. Footnote 2 Games such as Mortal Kombat, Doom, and Manhunt have all caused controversy in the past. There is a history of blaming VVGs for violent acts such as school shootings, mass shootings, and murder in the United States. Having rejected these accounts of the comparative badness of VVGs, Sect. “ The internal logic of violent video games” offers an alternative explanation. Section “ The violence argument” considers the claim that VVGs are bad in virtue of features like realism that are independent of their consequences, but we conclude that existing accounts of these features fail to adequately explain why some VVGs should be considered morally objectionable. Section “ The causation argument” considers the claim that it is wrong to design and play VVGs in virtue of their bad consequences and concludes that the empirical evidence that playing VVGs causes bad outcomes is inconclusive, and that even if we grant that they have bad effects, VVGs are not distinctively bad in this respect. Section “ Background and preliminaries” gives a brief overview of the controversies surrounding VVGs and explains how we will structure and focus our evaluation. Not only does regulation raise a number of other ethical considerations-including free speech, paternalism, and policy design and enforcement-it also requires that we first understand the comparative badness of VVGs. In this paper, we evaluate the most common answers to the moral and comparison questions, but set aside the regulation question. Regulation Question: What should be done about them?įor example, one might argue that VVGs desensitize players to violence thereby making them more likely to act violently themselves, that VVGs do this more effectively than violent films or books, and that VVGs should therefore be prohibited or strongly regulated. Moral Question: Why are VVGs morally bad or wrong?Ĭomparison Question: Why are they worse than other forms of violent entertainment? Moral objections to VVGs have three main components, which can be understood as answers to the following three questions: The aim of this paper is to determine which, if any, of the concerns raised about VVGs are legitimate. Footnote 1 Others, including moral objections to VVGs, have persisted. Some of these controversies have fizzled out over time and have come to be viewed as cases of moral panic. Other entertainment products have been criticized on moral grounds, from pornography to heavy metal, horror films, and Harry Potter books. They are not unique in this respect, though. Violent video games (VVGs) are a source of serious and continuing controversy. This allows us to recognize that some games are morally worse than others-and that it can be morally wrong to design and play some VVGs-but that the moral badness of these games is not necessarily dependent on how violent they are. Our view suggests that the moral badness of a game depends on how well its internal logic expresses or encourages the players’ objectionable attitudes. We argue that common moral objections to VVGs are unsuccessful, but that a plausible critique can be developed that captures the insights of these objections while avoiding their pitfalls. Others, including moral objections to VVGs, have persisted.
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