Questions on how ethical choices in games are affected by gamers’
pre-existing personalities and ideas about their ideal selves, have
largely been unanswered. There is a lot of research about the
relationship between a person’s “real life” self and game self,
but often this research discusses if and how playing violent games can
translate into real life violent behaviour (Carnagey, Anderson, &
Buschman, 2007; Vieira & Krcmar, 2011, Everaert, 2014). The current
study used an online questionnaire to reach over 2,000 Mass Effect
players. By looking at the relationship between one’s actual, ideal
and game self, we attempt to find out whether ideas about personality
traits can predict a certain play style in Mass Effect 2 (paragon,
renegade, mixed, neither). Building on the work of Przybylski,
Weinstein, Murayama, Lynch, & Ryan (2011), we want to investigate
whether people’s ethical or gameplay choices in games are connected
to their ideas about their actual or ideal self. Additionally, a
comparison of a person’s answer to the trolley question to that of
the game character can offer insight into whether or not real-life and
in-game morality converge or diverge. We suspect that people’s
answer to the trolley question will converge with the answer a paragon
or renegade Mass Effect character would give (from a deontological or
utilitarian point of view respectively).
