Box 2.

Undertale: testing morality by defying convention

Undertale is a 2D role-playing game (RPG) developed by Toby Fox released in 2015 (Fox, 2015). RPG refers to a genre of games with a common ancestry traceable to the tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons. Characteristic conventions of RPGs include (i) embodying a character that (ii) grows over time (i.e. levels up) by (iii) defeating enemies and completing quests. In the game Undertale, the player controls a child that fell into the magical world of the Underground and must make their way back to the surface. Genre convention dictates that any enemy that engages the child in combat should be defeated to then level up and reach the ending. However, game developer Fox advertised the game as ‘The RPG game where you don’t have to destroy anyone’. With this tagline, Undertale becomes an experiment in morality wherein a player’s prior experience with RPG convention is pitted against the knowledge that no ‘enemy’ in the game must perish. It is exceedingly easy to defeat enemies early in the game, but this dynamically changes the shape of the narrative where nonplayer characters guilt the player with dialogues like, ‘You killed him. He had a family, just like you. Did you ever think about that?’ Executing the no-kill (pacifist) version of the narrative takes a surprising amount of effort, creativity and trust in the knowledge that there is indeed a way to progress through the game without felling anyone. Moreover, this also strips away the typical RPG reward system because, without killing enemies, the player does not level up as they would otherwise, which disincentivizes this mode of play by increasing the relative challenge of each encounter. By understanding and defying genre convention, Fox effectively created a game that artificially manipulated the extent to which a participant will expend effort to uphold moral decision-making (i.e. don’t kill) despite the ease of and experience with making the immoral decision (i.e. kill) to achieve personal goals (i.e. level up and beat the game). This is a prime example of a convention-defying media stimulus that could be used as inspiration for behavioral and/or neuroimaging experiments to study moral decision-making processes in rich first-person scenarios.