I don't play computer games. Hence, I am not the world's greatest authority on them. Admitting this in the first line of an article about gaming might not be the brightest idea in the world but bear with me. The working title given to me for this article was "The morals behind life like computer games", which as I'm being honest with you, I fairly swiftly deemed dull and done to death as it immediately brings to mind the ongoing debate on whether or not computer games are a direct influence on individuals who commit violent acts. So, why read an article by a non-gamer without a clue, about a topic that's been covered an infinite number of times? Because this is not an article about whether or not computer games cause violence. Instead, let us take a slightly different tour of the subject, whilst looking to the future…..and speculating wildly!

Morals are a tough subject to deal with in themselves. Each individual has their own morals, principles, ethics or whatever you wish to name them, religious or not, all wound up into a personal, often very private code by which they live. Their own sense of what is right and what is wrong and although the overlapping cross-section between mine and yours may be great, at the very least the fringes will be blurry and of our own making. There is no fundamental set of morals by which everyone lives as there are always exceptions to the rule and in what one person sees as black and white, another will see many shades of grey. There is however what society dictates is right and wrong. Societies are born from groups of individual people and consequently, societies also differ in their beliefs, however I'm probably fairly safe saying that murder and theft, amongst other things, belong in the immoral category for most groups of people.

So why exactly is it that socially unacceptable acts provide one of the largest foundations of subject matter that the gaming industry commits to pixels every year? Fighting, stealing, killing - all wrong according to society and its laws and yet people absolutely love it. In fact, many become addicted to it. It may be virtual, no more real than in a movie, only flashing lights and digital smoke and mirrors but just because the acts have no substance to them and no real world consequences, are the games in which they occur morally right or morally wrong?

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