The Digital Catharsis of Crime: Pleasure, Guilt, and Moral Boundaries in Open-World Video Games

Sammanfattning

This thesis investigates how players of Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 morally make sense of in-game crime. The study is motivated by the fact that video games are important cultural spaces where players not only watch crime and violence but also participate in them through play. While previous research on violent video games has often focused on aggression and media effects, this thesis builds on qualitative, criminological, and ethical approaches that understand players as active interpreters of virtual violence, deviance, and moral responsibility. The aim is to examine how players describe, emotionally experience, justify, question, and repair their own in-game crimes, and how the two games’ systems shape these experiences. Theoretically, the thesis draws on cultural criminology, play theory, and moral agency, especially the ideas of crime as carnival, play as a bounded but unstable activity, and moral disengagement as a way of managing responsibility. Methodologically, it uses a qualitative design based on 15 semi-structured interviews and 29 Reddit discussions from four game-related subreddits, analysed through qualitative content analysis. The findings show that in-game crime is not experienced in one simple way. Players can enjoy criminal actions because they create excitement, humour, freedom, challenge, or release, but the same actions can also produce guilt, discomfort, hesitation, or attempts to undo what happened. The comparison shows that design matters. Grand Theft Auto V often makes crime feel fast, exaggerated, and easy to repeat, turning wrongdoing into action, humour, and spectacle. Red Dead Redemption 2 often makes crime feel heavier by connecting wrongdoing to social reactions, moral judgement, and visible consequences. This thesis argues that in-game crime is not morally empty simply because it is fictional. Instead, it becomes meaningful through the interaction between players, game systems, emotions, victims, and wider cultural understandings of crime, violence, and responsibility. The contribution of the thesis is to show how crime centred games make law-breaking playable and create spaces where morality is constantly negotiated.