Games without frontiers: On the moral and psychological implications of violating taboos within multi-player virtual spaces

When assessing the appropriateness of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, it is our contention that questions dealing with the morality of their content – especially regarding the more ‘adult’ nature of potential interactions – are the wrong sorts of questions to ask. Instead, when considering the permissibility of such games, a more informative strategy is to focus on what gamers are able to deal with, psychologically, especially regarding taboo violation. Thus, we argue that there is nothing morally problematic with online gamespace per se, no matter how prohibitive the simulated behaviour is offline (as long as the space is frequented by adults only). Instead, we should concern ourselves with whether the potential moral freedoms afforded the online gaming community are psychologically healthy: For it is our contention that underlying any change to the gamer’s behaviour offline is the need (in some) to seek psychological parity across domains (making congruent one’s identity and actions in both the virtual and offline worlds). It is therefore not so much what games are doing to us that is of concern, here, but what we are doing to ourselves through the process of seeking psychological parity.