Ashes or Breath: Exploring Moral Dilemmas of Life and Cultural Legacy through Mixed Reality Gaming

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mixed reality game that immerses players in moral dilemmas within a museum fire scenario, enhancing emotional engagement and ethical reflection through embodied interaction and spatial immersion.

Contribution

It presents a novel MR-HMD based approach for ethics education that increases emotional stakes and promotes deeper moral introspection compared to traditional methods.

Findings

Embedding dilemmas in MR environments heightens empathy.

Spatial immersion deepens moral reflection.

Preliminary evaluations show increased ethical awareness.

Abstract

Traditional approaches to teaching moral dilemmas often rely on abstract, disembodied scenarios that limit emotional engagement and reflective depth. To address this gap, we developed \textit{Ashes or Breath}, a Mixed Reality game delivered via head-mounted displays(MR-HMDs). This places players in an ethical crisis: they must save a living cat or a priceless cultural artifact during a museum fire. Designed through an iterative, values-centered process, the experience leverages embodied interaction and spatial immersion to heighten emotional stakes and provoke ethical reflection. Players face irreversible, emotionally charged choices followed by narrative consequences in a reflective room, exploring diverse perspectives and societal implications. Preliminary evaluations suggest that embedding moral dilemmas into everyday environments via MR-HMDs intensifies empathy, deepens introspection, and encourages users to reconsider their moral assumptions. This work contributes to ethics-based experiential learning in HCI, positioning augmented reality not merely as a medium of interaction but as a stage for ethical encounter.