Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2022

Many contemporary video games incorporate decision-making mechanics that can alter a game’s narrative experience for players. Often, these decisions challenge players to engage with questions of ethics, morality and empathy. Much of the previous research on moral decision-making in games assumes that players utilize real-world moral frameworks to make these decisions, without accounting for the way that game spaces function as unique sites for this type of decision-making. Video games can uniquely incentivize or punish players for their in-game decisions, shaping the way players engage with issues of morality. This study examines factors that influence how players approach moral decision-making in video games. Using semi-structured interviews with 24 individuals, we explored how both players’ real-world moral foundations and in-game constraints guide their moral decisions. Findings include how customizable avatars, subsequent playthroughs, in-game rewards and the manner in which a moral conflict is presented to players all influence their choices.

Challenge is a key gratification sought in video games, and punishment by character death is often the repercussion for poor performance, requiring players to recover or restart. But some gamers go a step further and opt into games that feature permadeath: the permanent death of a game character with no opportunity to recover that character. These experiences may be emotionally taxing for players, but under some circumstances, they can enhance the meaningfulness of the play experience. Participants (N = 394) recruited from online gaming forums were randomly assigned to report on a past permadeath or temporary death gaming experience in order to help understand how the two forms of death experiences may differently impact affective responses, mortality salience and appreciation responses. Permadeath recollections were associated with increased appreciation, mediated by reported grief over the deaths. This indirect effect was stronger for those with stronger parasocial attachments to their characters and those with decreased tendencies to engage in trait meaning making. These findings hint that players less inclined to find meaning in everyday stressors could be more likely to derive meaning from their tragedies in game worlds.

This article explores how atmosphere is implicated in the establishment of place in gameworlds through the concept of the ‘refrain’. The atmosphere of a video game is often one of the most memorable constituents of our ludic experiences and is defining of the video game places we encounter during play, yet atmospheres remain highly under-researched and under-theorized within game studies. The article introduces some key theories of atmosphere and explain their relation to ‘place’ and subsequently explore how ‘place’ has been theorized and developed within game studies. I then elaborate on how atmosphere, understood existentially, is conducive to the creation of an atmosphere by addressing the examples of Dark Souls’ hub area and boss arenas. Working through the Deleuze–Guattarian concept of ‘refrain’, I argue that patterns of sound, images and behaviours establish a territory marked by a certain affective intensity, or atmosphere, enabling the experience of place.

This article explores elements of monstrosity in Yoko Taro’s NieR: Automata (Platinum Games 2017), arguing in specific that the main ‘monster’ is represented through an extreme distortion of humanity’s values and ideals. The analysis is supported by traditional literature regarding the monstrous and the monstrous-feminine, associated with the definition of dark play and its elements such as dehumanization, to conduct a close reading of NieR: Automata lore, visuals and mechanics. Through the analysis of Simone – a monstrous-feminine machine – as a key point in the journey of discovery enacted by player and game characters, we conclude that machines and androids’ intent understanding and performance of human values, such as beauty, love and consumerism, positions the player as the monster all along.