Roleplaying the Future of Surveillance

Design of a Serious Game for Cybersecurity Ethics Training

Serious moral games offer a tool for moral development that can help players translate ‘head knowledge’ of ethical principles into habits of everyday practice. In this paper, we present the design process behind one such game: Prescott & Krueger, a serious game for training information technology students in cybersecurity ethics. Our design draws on the Four Component Model of moral intelligence and the Morality Play model for serious moral game design. We reflect on how these models influenced our design process. The Four Component Model proved a useful set of lenses for developing learning outcomes and game narrative and mechanics, however the more prescriptive Morality Play model was more difficult to apply as the development of a sophisticated ‘moral toy’ required modelling both low-level cybersecurity systems and high-level ethical interpretations. We reflect on the broader implications of this problem for serious moral game design.

Game Creation, Monetisation Models, and Ethical Concerns

This paper explores the relationship between monetisation models, game design and ethical considerations from the perspective of three different small-scale Norwegian game companies. Interviews with game designers and CEOs form the empirical basis of the analysis. The analysis shows that their notion of the market situation differs and that concepts like quality and ethical responsibility vary greatly between the companies. A concern they all share is that the computer game market is becoming increasingly difficult to monetise and that using models like loot boxes seem more relevant now than before.

Animal ethics in digital games

“It’s About Fate, Among Other Things” – Digital Games, Dialogical Teaching, And Ethics

Fostering ethics and morality in adult learning through gameplay

Digital games, cultural memory, & hegemony

Ethics at Play in Undertale: Rhetoric, Identity and Deconstruction

This paper focuses on the effect of ethical – and unethical – actions of the player on their perception of the self towards game characters within Toby Fox’s (2015) independent Role Playing Game (RPG) Undertale, a game often perceived as a pacifist text. With a focus on the notions of guilt and responsibility in mind, a survey with 560 participants from the Undertale fandom was conducted, and thousands of YouTube comments were scraped to better understand how the audience who watched or played the different routes of the game, refer to its characters. Through the joint analysis of the game’s semiotics, survey data, and data scraping, this paper argues that, beyond the rhetorical nature of its story, Undertale is operating a deconstruction of the RPG genre and is harnessing the emotional power of gameplay to evoke thoughts about responsibility and raise the player’s awareness about violence and its consequences.

Harvester of Desires: Gaming Amazon Echo through John Cayley’s The Listeners

Over the past two years, smart speakers such as Amazon Echo have become popular entertainment technologies and, increasingly, game platforms in households across the globe. These systems are controlled through voice-interactive Artificial Intelligences such as Amazon’s Alexa. The present work seeks to open a conversation about voice-interactive games on smart speaker systems in game studies. While these platforms open exciting new creative spaces for gamers and game developers alike, they also raise ethical concerns: Smart speakers are powerful twenty-first century surveillance capable of interpreting, recording and synthesizing human speech. Through the lens of a case study on John Cayley’s ludic Alexa skill The Listeners, this paper interrogates how Amazon Echo’s technological affordances enable new forms of surveillance while also giving rise to a new poetics of voice interaction. Illuminating aesthetic and ethical dimensions can help scholars in game studies assess the risks and perks of this new ludic platform.

War Ethics: A Framework for Analyzing Videogames

While much has been done exploring how ethics and videogames can overlap in interesting ways, there is little work examining the philosophy of war and its relation to videogames. This seems unusual since videogames have a long tradition of engaging with war as its subject matter. We provide a framework for analyzing and articulating ethical issues and concerns in videogames that feature representations of war. This framework is based in traditional war ethics, more specifically the notion of the “just war” and considers the ethical concerns that include when engaging in a war is morally justified (jus ad bellum), how to wage a war ethically (jus in bello) and the ethical responsibilities of the aftermath of a war (jus post bellum). Our framework consists of five lenses consisting of the perspective offered to players, the scale and scope of war represented, the centrality of war to the game experience, the type of military that appear in the game, and the authenticity of a game’s representation. For each lens we also provide a list of questions that can be used to examine the subtleties and nuances of how war is represented in the game that hopefully lead to deeper and more insightful analyses. We conclude with thoughts on how this approach could be productive as well as outline some additional areas worth considering for future work.