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The Blind Gamer

This post is by Kamyab Ghorbanpour, Michał Klincewicz, Paris Mavromoustakos Blom and Pieter Spronck who recently published a paper entitled: "The Blind Gamer: Examining Ethical Agency Through Choice Blindness in Game Design" in Entertainment Computing.



Kamyab Ghorbanpour


When you ask someone why they chose to read a particular book, they will usually give you a story. It might be about how they came across it in a bookstore, how it was highly recommended by their friends, or how it resembled a book they had previously enjoyed. Regardless, they will provide a story, a story believed both by you and by themselves. But what if that story is untrue? What if they weren’t actually aware of why they chose that book? What if they were confabulating without even realizing it?

Choice blindness shows that this is not an unlikely scenario. Research has demonstrated that people can make decisions without being fully aware of them—or, for lack of a better term, they think they know why and may even confidently “remember” a decision if you trick them into justifying an entirely different one.



Paris Mavromoustakos Blom

We designed an adventure video game called Lost Civilization in which players make morally engaging decisions. The game blends elements of magical realism and science fiction. Lost Civilization tells the story of a researcher at Tilburg University (where participants played the game) who is tasked with uncovering the mysteries of a lost alien civilization. 

Across eight decision points, the player faces dilemmas of varying scope. For instance, in one decision, the player must choose how to handle missing a deadline: by offering an excuse, being completely honest, fabricating data, or not showing up at all. All of the decisions are framed within a semi-academic environment.



Michał Klincewicz


After the game concluded, we presented participants with screenshots and asked them to explain the reasoning behind their choices. Unbeknownst to them, we had altered one of their decisions, effectively reversing its meaning. The majority did not notice the change and continued justifying the altered choice as if it were their own.

The results were both surprising and revealing. We analyzed participants’ explanations using psychological tools commonly applied in serious game research, such as the established Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and the newer Morality as Cooperation (MAC) framework, to test whether people’s moral values had predictive power for resistance to manipulation. Higher scores on the virtue of deference were associated with greater resistance to manipulation, particularly among women. 


Pieter Spronck


This finding suggests that certain moral orientations may serve as protective factors against manipulation. Conversely, higher scores on family-related virtues were linked to increased susceptibility to choice blindness, especially in dilemmas involving fairness, reciprocity, and property. This paradoxical relationship between family orientation and vulnerability to manipulation warrants further investigation.

The most striking result, however, was the gender disparity. As reported in the Results section, women were approximately 6.2 times more likely than men to resist manipulation—a difference that was both statistically significant (p = 0.002) and practically meaningful. When expressed in predicted probabilities, the contrast becomes even clearer: women demonstrated an 83.82% likelihood of resisting manipulation, compared to just 12.44% for men. This substantial gender gap raises important questions about the psychological and social mechanisms underlying such differences.


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