Gamification of the Moral Dilemma: An Analysis of Telltale's “The Walking Dead”

There is a litany of problems with self-report as a method of data collection: people lie,
forget, convince themselves of non-realities, and run information through cognitive filters before
relaying it to researchers. Many of these problems are compounded by emotional arousal, which
renders it a suboptimal technique for learning about how people may judge or behave in moral
dilemmas. In truth, people often espouse beliefs and then act contrary to those values,
particularly under certain circumstances. From an ethological perspective, the study of morality
is sorely lacking.
Obviously, there are ethical considerations. For example, putting participants in real (or
real-to-them) moral dilemmas and seeing how they behave is quite suspect, but what about a
video game? In 2012, Telltale Games released The Walking Dead, an interactive narrative PC
game wherein players are led through dozens of separate dilemmas related to the characters'
zombie apocalypse scenario. Players must often make emotionally-charged decisions very
quickly—you are specifically not given the time to consult anything but your gut before making
a call. This bypasses many of the filters that disrupt the accuracy of self-report with regard to
implicit beliefs and action under pressure.
Indeed, the makers of this game already record and report global statistics about major
decisions at the end of each chapter of the game. Their code likely captures reaction times and
other finer points of player decision making as well. Could this sort of behavioral data,
combined with demographic data and self-report, help elucidate the moral domain?
The types of choices required of players in The Walking Dead span the moral spectrum; it
includes several examples of each foundation in the Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt and
Joseph, 2006). In the game, you play history professor and recently convicted murderer Lee
Everett who is on his way to prison just outside of Atlanta when the zombie apocalypse occurs.
After your escort car crashes and you rediscover what is left of civilization, you quickly happen
upon an 8-year-old girl named Clementine Marsh, who saves you from her zombified babysitter
by being very timely with a hammer. She tells you her parents were away in Savannah when
everything happened—she's been surviving alone in her tree house. You assume responsibility
for Clementine for the remainder of the game.
 Clementine is the strongest trigger of the Care foundation, which has its evolutionary
roots in attachment to and protection of children. She is placed in danger and discomfort on your
watch constantly and game statistics demonstrate that players jump at the opportunity to
minimize her suffering, emotional and otherwise. (It is worth noting that the developers very
nearly did not include Clementine in the game—they were uncertain players would care about
her enough to drive the plot.) As the game progresses, your relationship with her evolves into
something that invokes several other foundations.
Much of the plot focuses on survival and basic resource management. You can rapidly
gain favor with a person by sacrificing for them and those close to them (namely family). In an
emergency situation like this one, people are eager to cling to those they know they can trust in a
pinch. The Loyalty foundation is evoked strongly by group composition after the onset of the
apocalypse—strangers are not assumed friendly upon approach and you do what you can to
protect your people (i.e. your particular band of survivors). You and your group often encounter
cases of “us or them” wherein you are pressured to do morally ambiguous things to further your
own ends, like steal food and supplies from what seems to be a very recently vacated car. Acts
of mercy or kindness toward non-group members becomes suspect in the light of limited means
and persistent threats of violence, from zombies and the living alike.
Ingroup conflict is also prevalent. As in any task-driven social scenario, individuals with
organizational and leadership tendencies attempt to control the situation. Inevitably, others
question or resent that. It becomes apparent that some characters have more easily violated
Liberty and Authority boundaries than others; the game gives you ample opportunity to either
exert authority yourself or have it exerted upon you. You can choose to accept or shirk
leadership and ally yourself with some group members at the expense of your relationships with
others in an attempt to sway group action. The personalities you align with in The Walking Dead
speak strongly to preferences concerning those two foundations.
The more authoritarian characters do mean well; they want to fairly divide food and
labor, a perfectly reasonable expectation. The Fairness foundation deals with some heavy
material in this game, often matters of life and death. For example, when some supplies go
missing, the extent to which you investigate the act and ultimately distribute justice is largely up
to you. Characters most passionate about proportionality take retribution to extremes and
whether you choose to banish them as a result or demonstrate mercy is also your decision.
 The unnaturalness of shambling, hungry corpses is not lost on Telltale. They constantly
push the Sanctity/Purity foundation, from survival-rationalized cannibalism to paranoia about
how someone becomes infected with the disease that turns them undead. They also utilize the
game's setting in the Southern United States to consider religion. One particularly memorable
event involves you and your group rescuing a woman trapped in a hotel room by walkers only to
discover she has been previously injured by them and actually barricaded herself inside. The
woman says she saw her boyfriend deteriorate following a bite—you get sick and die, then you
reanimate and kill everything you can find. She said she did not want that because “it's not
Christian”, so she isolated herself. Interestingly, the dilemma here is that she wants to use your
gun to kill herself. She concluded that suicide was the higher road. The player split here was
near 50/50 on whether or not to give her the gun.
Lee becomes a man reflective of his choices throughout the story. Because these are the
player's choices and particularly because they correspond to closely held values, there is a keen
sense of ego involvement as his character develops and weaves into the dynamic. It is possible
that this increases the consistency between player and person with regard to behavior, making the
data more useful from an academic standpoint. As I alluded to before, it would also be important
to contextualize any behavioral data garnered from something like a game with validated self-
report measures and extensive demographic data, up to and including political affiliation. That
being said, the immersive environment of modern video games is a potentially powerful tool for
social scientists looking to measure behavior in particular scenarios. Furthermore, this
technology could be combined with neuroimaging techniques to gain insight into the neural
activity surrounding the decision-making. Technology is rapidly enabling psychology to
transcend (or at least meaningfully complement) self-report measures.

Reference:

Haidt, J., & Joseph, C. (2006). The moral mind: How 5 sets of innate moral intuitions guide the
development of many culture-specific virtues, and perhaps even modules. In P.
Carruthers, S. Laurence, and S. Stich (Eds.) The Innate Mind, Vol. 3.