Games, Values and Ethics
Karen is the director of interactive media and technology at ESI Design and a part-time doctoral student at Columbia University in games and learning. Her co-edited volume, Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values through Play, just came out last month. 
How can we design games to better support the practice of ethical thinking skills? What are the ethics of designing, producing, playing and distributing games? These are the questions that drive my new edited collection, Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values through Play, published last month by IGI Global.
Ethical thinking and reasoning is the ability to analyze, assess and reflect on our decisions and actions, and understand the consequences and complexities of social issues and possibilities. It is the ability to use appropriate judgment in diverse situations and make choices that lead to “being a good human being” (Sicart, 2005). Such skills not only make you a better person, but they make you a better citizen. We need to be able to analyze, empathize, make decisions about values, identify biases, and reflect on one’s beliefs, and assess others’ perspectives as an engaged, informed citizenship.
Because ethics and values evolve in different contexts and over time, we need global citizens who can think through these issues and choices and decide what is right for them, their families, their societies and the world. I believe one possibility for teaching ethics is through play. The notion that games can help people reflect on values is both innovative and as old as humankind. Play has always been a way to allow people to experiment with other perspectives, to reenact scenarios, to practice collaborating and competing, and to try out different roles and belief systems.
Digital games might be well-suited to the practice and development of ethical thinking, because it is a computationally rich platform that enables players to iterate on different possibilities and consequences. It also provides an authentic context within which to practice these types of skills, without necessarily real-world consequences. However, as games become more integrated into the real world, we will need to better understand how to navigate the social norms and cultures of online media and to reflect on how our in-game actions might affect real-world people. As games become more embedded in everyday life, understanding the ethics of their creation and development, as well as how they are played, becomes more and more relevant.
Ethics and Game Design Volume One incorporates perspectives from many diverse disciplines–computer science, art, law, philosophy, media studies, psychology, games studies, and education–to try to understand the appropriate frameworks and issues to tackle these questions. The purpose of the book is not to decide whether games are good or bad, but to reflect on the potential of games to help us think about values and ethics. As we delve deeper in this new field, it ultimately invites us to re-evaluate what it means to be human and gain insight into our own humanity. When it comes down to it, through games, we are seeking new ways to experience the world, to understand humankind, to reflect on our identities, our destinies, our pasts and our mysteries. We may never fully answer these questions, but hopefully games will help us begin to approach them.
For more information about the book, please check out:
http://old.igi-global.com/reference/details.asp?ID=35966&v=tableOfContents
Discount form: http://www.igi-global.com/Files/Discount/35966.pdf
This is just one of the topics to be explored at LEEF, the Learning and Entertainment Evolution Forum on June 17-18. LEEF is an interactive professional development event showcasing the convergence of learning and entertainment technologies and exploring the organizational, design and technical challenges for adopting games and simulations for learning. Join Karen and presenters such as Jerry Heneghan of Applied Research Associates, Mike Cuffe, VP at Farmer’s Insurance, Phaedra Boinodiris of IBM, Koreen Olbrish of Tandem Learning, and more at LEEF this summer! The event will take place in Central Pennsylvania at Harrisburg University. Go to www.LEEF2010.net to learn more about the program!
