Guilt in DayZ

Death in most games is simply a metaphor for failure (Bartle 2010). Killing another player in a first-person shooter (FPS) game such as Call of Duty (Infinity Ward 2003) is generally considered to be as transgressive as taking an opponent’s pawn in chess. In an early exploratory study of players’ experiences and processing of violence in digital videogames, Christoph Klimmt and his colleagues concluded that “moral management does not apply to multiplayer combat games”(2006, 325). In other words, player killing is not a violation of moral codes or a source of moral concern for players. Subsequent studies of player experiences of guilt and moral concern in violent videogames (Hartmann, Toz, and Brandon 2010; Hartmann and Vorderer 2010; Gollwitzer and Melzer 2012) have consequently focused on the moral experiences associated with single-player games and the engagement with transgressive fictional, virtual narrative content.