ABSTRACT
In the case of first-person shooters, however, the representational violence is often represented so that it does not directly implicate our shared, moral reality. We are often shooting aliens, or spies, or members of a competing faction. Whatever we are doing in these games is sufficiently insulated from our shared, moral reality so as to make the challenge “come on, it’s only a game!” a credible one. It is this insulation from the real world that makes the kind of associated character evaluations like “see how she has defended the citizens against the aggressive attack of the space aliens; she is certainly a good person!” misplaced. When morally challenging representational content reflects our actual, shared history of systematic moral violations like gender oppression, this can serve to fix the meaning of such imagery, and thereby open the door for associated character evaluations.
