On February 5, 2026, during an interview, the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, expressed the fact that: “the violence that is taking hold in society among the youngest […] is also linked to the fact that children and adolescents are much more exposed to violence in videos.” Video games, he continued, “where we take down everyone, including Fortnite“That’s not life, because it derealizes the relationship with violence.”
However, the recent craze around Clair Obscur : Expedition 33 – critically acclaimed game and winner of the Game Awards 2025 and the Pégases 2025 for its narrative approach and its exploration of moral dilemmas – reminds us that video games can also be a vector for deep reflection. Chiaroscuro illustrates the ability of a game to arouse complex emotions, questioning the player well beyond simple entertainment.
Sparking indignation among gamers, the presidential remark relaunched the debate on the effects of the violence inherent in many games on the behavior of young people in the real world. Certainly, the head of state recognized that it was not necessary to put “everything in the same bag” and that certain uses of video games were “good”, as indeed attested by an entire literature in game studies around historical, persuasive, educational games or even what we call serious games.
However, as economist Agne Suziedelyte has shown, it is difficult to find empirical evidence that children’s reported acts of violence against others increase after the release of a new violent video game. Thus, policies that restrict the sale of video games to minors would, according to the author, have little chance of reducing violence.
The question of violence and its effects, however, remains unresolved when we look more closely at the way war games are designed. Our hypothesis is that certain games can generate violence, or make people indifferent to violence, because they mobilize the figure of the hero and they give priority to the playful dynamics of the game.
Other games, on the contrary, are capable of creating a design and a narrative that encourage players to true moral reflection. In both cases, as we suggest in our work, Emotions and Video Games. A behavioral and institutional approach (Garnier Flammarion, 2026), it is the emotions felt and expressed by the players which are at the heart of the video game dynamic and moral learning.
When entertainment erases ethics
A video game is above all a clever mix between the definition of more or less rigid rules (what we call game) and a game mechanic which gives the player the pleasure (the fun) that he came to seek (what we call the play). In all games, designers seek to maintain an attractive balance between constraints (induced by the rules) and the player’s freedom of action.
Similarly, designers are concerned with finding a balance between the player’s hedonic experience and what they learn or grasp during that experience. The “retentional economy” of video games involves in particular the implementation of a video game interface (design, narration, cinematics, etc.) which constantly arouses the attention of players, notably through “affective amplification” mechanisms. This is how, according to James Ash, a researcher in games studiesthat when “the variables [Ã saisir dans le jeu] are too numerous, the player is overwhelmed and loses the feeling of control; Conversely, if there are not enough, he may become bored due to a lack of challenges.”
By studying war games, also called first-person shooter games – like, for example, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, Battlefield, Overwatch, Halo, Rainbow Six – researchers in video game studies have shown that these violent games distort the reality of war by resorting to mechanisms of moral disengagement: justification and systematic incitement of violence, highlighting the figure of the hero, obscuring the consequences of war, dehumanization of enemies, invisibility of victims and vulnerable populations (such as women and children).
These processes – narrative and playful – transform war into entertainment without moral ambiguity. By avoiding any confrontation with the ethical complexity of real conflicts (trauma, grief, dilemmas), these games trivialize violence and reduce empathy, while reinforcing a simplistic vision of good versus evil. The player draws no moral intuition from his experience in the game and misses the representation of what a “just war” would be in which the protagonists would respect the humanitarian standards set by the Geneva Convention.
Video games and moral responsibility: the example of white phosphorus in Spec Ops: The Line
In games, morality was first introduced in opposition to the player’s self-interest. For example, Papers, Please embarrasses players by confronting them with their desire to continue progressing in the game which opposes the possibility of helping one of the virtual characters in the game. The moral dilemma is called “impure”, since the player has an interest in not helping the character. More interesting is the situation where interest does not come into play as is the case in the frightening Until Dawn where the player must decide which virtual character to sacrifice, without this having an impact on their progress in the game.
In these cases, the player faces a real moral dilemma. However, does he learn anything of his own choosing?
In a more recent version of Call of Duty : Modern Warfarethe player does not control a highly trained soldier (a hero) but a wounded, traumatized child, trapped in a ravaged space. By playing in particular on the mechanics of the game (reduced movement speed, absence of weapons, etc.) and on the helplessness of its player-character, this episode offers an immersive experience which promotes an empathetic awareness towards civilians, real or fictional, in conflict zones. These scenarios can thus give rise to more elaborate moral reflection in the player.
We can, however, go further by evoking the central role of games – like Spec Ops : The Line or This War of Mine – which are described as “anti-war”, because they seek to deconstruct the figure of the hero and the aestheticization of war by depicting human suffering, by causing voluntary discomfort in the player and by refusing to reward violence in the game.
This War of Mine enjoyed undeniable commercial success (more than 4.5 million copies sold worldwide) while Spec Ops : The Line has become a cult game for its bold narrative approach and critique of war. One scene in particular attracted the attention of researchers: that of “white phosphorus”. Designed to produce smoke or create camouflage, white phosphorus is above all recognized and denounced by the Geneva Convention for its use as a chemical weapon. On March 3, 2026, an NGO notably accused the State of Israel of having “illegally” used white phosphorus near inhabited areas in southern Lebanon.
In Spec Ops : The Linethe mechanics of the game force the player-character to commit an atrocity (when he uses phosphorus to defeat enemies and kills, in turn, innocent civilians) then accuses him through a non-player character (or NPC) when the latter confronts him with the consequences of his action and his responsibility:
« [T] u aurais pu arrêter. »
The player is encouraged to disapprove of his immoral behavior through the guilt he feels. By locking the player’s possible actions, the narrative and the gameplay together underline a brutal truth: in a war situation, “choices” are only a false freedom, masking the real absence of moral outcomes.
Violence and video games: design as a lever for moral sensitivity
Let’s summarize. On the one hand, we find players encouraged to mime violence or the least rendered indifferent to violence in standard war games. On the other, participants who have a sensitive experience of war and who can draw moral significance from it. The hypothesis that we develop extensively in our work is that the expression of the player’s sensitivity depends crucially on the context in which he is immersed. The effects of violence in the game therefore depend mainly on the design imagined and produced by the designers and developers.
The work carried out by video game studies researcher Stéphanie de Smale and her colleagues questions the moral and emotional logic of the game from the point of view of game designers. This War of Mine. For the latter, “humanizing the experience of war” implies that players no longer perceive non-player characters as simple resources, but as human beings. The design must also deliberately integrate moments of discomfort (and therefore negatively valenced emotions such as disgust, sadness, fear, guilt or anger). The presence of children on the battlefield, for example, is intended to arouse confusion, even indignation (“They shouldn’t be there!”).
The story, the potential offered by the game (mechanics, interactions) as well as the language and bodily expressions of the non-player characters must combine their effects to awaken the moral sensitivity of the players. Apart from the numerous testimonies from players and developers, it is difficult to establish an empirical link between discomfort and morality. However, we can measure the fact that stressful situations in a game like Nevermind physiologically activate emotions with negative valence. Therefore, these emotions can incite moral actions.
Furthermore, the creation of an opposing world, even a virtual one, is likely to expose the game designers themselves to a form of structural apathy or “emotional numbness”. To protect themselves from this, they call on players to test the game at different stages of the creative process, thus avoiding a form of desensitization in the face of a gameplay emotionally taxing. Faced with a repeated situation of violence, even virtual, individuals can seek to protect themselves by adopting a form of denial, as moderators do on social networks, for example.
We can therefore conclude that the real impact of violence in video games is in no way the result of chance. It depends, as Holger Pötzsch, researcher in game studiesthe way in which the forms (realistic or not) of violence are represented, hidden or filtered, the way in which the player-character embodies (or not) a heroicized masculinist ideology, the tangible consequences of the actions he is led to pursue and, finally, the acuteness and truth of the moral dilemmas to which he is subjected. These different filters directly question the responsibility of designers through what they offer in the games placed on the market.
