As I’ve said before, you probably don’t need me to tell you that video games sometimes attract a bad reputation. For causing violent behavior, for causing compulsive play, for rotting your brain when you could be doing more productive things. One of these areas where games might have gotten a bad rap is around moral development and moral reasoning. That is, I’ve heard the criticism that games –and movies, and television et cetera– corrupt youths’ morals by exposing them to situations and characters that are either clearly morally bad, or at best too morally complex for kids to understand and react to. Age ratings aside, a lot of kids get ahold of games that present morally complex situations. And that kind of suggests the question: can playing certain games help kids develop their moral reasoning skills –that is, one’s ability to understand the complexities or moral or immoral behavior?
Those are the kinds of questions that I’ll explore with the help of this episode’s guest expert.
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Audio Credits:
- “Robot Motivation” by The Polish Ambassador, licensed under Creative Commons: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
- “Sneaky Snitch” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/