Potentials and Limits of Decision-Making Situations in Computer Games for Ethical and Moral Judgement

This report outlines a doctoral dissertation project by Rahel Stahmann-Ammour that investigates whether computer games can serve as effective media-pedagogical tools for developing students' ethical and moral reasoning. The central hypothesis holds that because games require active player engagement and continual decision-making, their decision points can be systematically integrated into ethics education, turning the classroom into what the author calls a "moral laboratory" where students can safely test principles and consider consequences without real-world stakes.

The theoretical groundwork compares several German didactic models of ethical reasoning, including Pfeifer's four-step model, Tödt's theory of ethical judgement, Thein's problem-oriented approach, and Henke's two-column model, alongside Sicart's concept of ludic phronesis as a framework for understanding player reasoning in games. The author argues that commercial off-the-shelf titles, though not designed for education, offer narrative-driven experiences well suited to experiential learning, and that deliberately introducing high "cognitive friction" into game decisions could deepen moral engagement. The author also notes that the project draws on prior master's work analyzing Life is Strange as a moral laboratory.

Methodologically, the study proceeds in three stages: comparative analysis of didactic models, a structured qualitative content analysis to categorize games by their capacity to trigger moral reasoning, and an empirical design-based research component. The latter involves thirty secondary school students across four iterative loops, in which the game's inherent prompts are first tested alone, then enhanced with didactic structures, piloted, and finally implemented, with students acting as co-researchers. The report presents this as a proposal rather than a set of results, and its stated outcomes include a didactic chapter and possibly a handbook for digital ethics education.