THE POLITICS OF THE FORCE: MORAL FOUNDATIONS, PARTISAN ANTAGONISM AND DECISION-MAKING IN STAR WARS: KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC AMONG SPANISH ADULT PLAYERS

This article examines how Spanish adult players interpret and justify their moral decisions in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) and the extent to which they draw on frames of partisan antagonism in doing so. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 players and analysed through codebook thematic analysis, complemented by a brief measure of affective polarisation and a case matrix. Twelve participants linked the Jedi and Sith factions with political blocs, but the direction of this link depended on their ideological self-placement: most left-leaning participants identified the Jedi with their own bloc, whereas four of the five right-leaning participants associated the Jedi Order with authority and tradition. The findings are organised into three themes: the faction as a mirror of the adversary, coherence as loyalty, and incongruence as monitored dissent. Antagonistic justifications for pure trajectories were concentrated among the eight participants with the highest affective polarisation, all of whom drew the association spontaneously, while three pure trajectories followed ludic or moral logics with no partisan component. The study concludes that KOTOR’s moral system works as a template onto which each player projects their moral foundations and their hostility towards the out-group, rather than as a fixed translation of the left-right axis.