Moral distress in The Last of Us: Moral agency, character realism, and navigating fixed gaming narratives

Moral agency describes one's comprehensive moral attitude developed through continuous evaluations of social and contextual information. However, in fixed-narrative games like The Last of Us (TLOU), player moral agency is compromised by excessive violence, restraints in player control, and moral dilemmas. Researchers suggest that video game players use moral disengagement and rationalization strategies to reduce emotional and moral distress arising from virtual participation in morally reprehensible activity. However, the realism of TLOU characters, the ubiquity of its violence, and the inability of its players to make in-game moral decisions may prove these coping mechanisms ineffectual, while suggesting the possibility of heretofore unexplored alternatives. In the present study, nine interview subjects explicate, through the evolution of the player-character relationship, the versatility of moral agency in games. The findings suggest that players expanded their moral agency and regained moral control through mentalizing or mind-reading character perspectives, thus reducing players' emotional distress, and increasing empathy and prosocial beliefs. This process was facilitated by TLOU's character realism and the simulation of social practice within player-character interactivity.