This War of Mine as a Promoter of Socio-Civic and Moral Competences: A Qualitative Study on Empathy, Ethical Reasoning, and Decision-Making Under Constraint

This study investigates whether and how gameplay in This War of Mine (11 bit studio, 2014) can function as a context for exercising socio-civic and moral competences, with a focus on empathy, ethical reasoning, and constrained decision-making. The game places players in the role of civilians attempting to survive in a war-torn environment characterized by scarcity, moral dilemmas, and constrained choices. Such conditions offer a potentially meaningful context for examining how empathy and moral reasoning are activated when individuals are required to make ethically relevant decisions under pressure. The conceptual framing draws on multidimensional accounts of empathy (Davis, 1983; Decety & Jackson, 2004) and on the view of moral functioning as involving distinguishable components such as moral sensitivity and moral judgment (Rest, 1986). To model the role of constraint, the study also leverages research on bounded rationality and dual-process accounts of judgment, including evidence that cognitive load can selectively affect utilitarian responding in moral dilemmas (Greene et al., 2008; Kahneman, 2011; Simon, 1955). The methodological design includes qualitative data from stimulated-recall interviews supported by gameplay recordings, analyzed via thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Ericsson & Simon, 1993). The study adopts a qualitative research design based on semi-structured interviews conducted before and after gameplay sessions. The interview protocol is designed to explore participants’ empathic engagement with the situations and characters represented in the game, focusing on how players interpret morally challenging scenarios, experience empathic concern, and justify their decisions within the constraints imposed by the game environment. Interview data will be analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), following an iterative process of coding and theme development aimed at identifying recurring patterns in participants’ accounts of empathic perspective-taking, emotional engagement, and moral deliberation during gameplay. This study aims to see if gameplay in This War of Mine elicits forms of moral engagement that go beyond mere strategic optimization, activating processes of empathic perspective-taking, affective resonance, and reflective ethical deliberation. The game’s mechanics, such as resource scarcity, time pressure, and the irreversibility of certain choices can be structural conditions that shape the quality and orientation of moral reasoning. In this sense, the game environment appears to operate as a form of situated moral laboratory, in which players are confronted with ethically salient trade-offs under conditions that partially mirror the bounded rationality characteristic of real-world moral decision-making (Kahneman, 2011; Simon, 1955). This paper contributes to the growing interdisciplinary literature at the intersection of game studies, moral psychology, and civic education by offering empirically grounded, qualitatively rich evidence of the processes through which a specific game environment can scaffold moral competence activation. Future research should extend these findings through longitudinal designs capable of assessing whether the forms of moral reasoning mobilized during gameplay transfer to extra-ludic contexts, and through comparative analyses involving games with different degrees of moral complexity and narrative constraint.