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The Videogame Ethics Reader
"Videogames are the dominant art form of the 21st century. How we go about designing and creating them, what we choose to say and express with them, and how we engage with and play them, reflects and informs our behavior and broader understanding of morality and ethics. In this book, Zagal has collected a series of essays that offer an amazing array of perspectives and views. Game designers, sociologists, legal scholars, media theorists, game researchers, philosophers, and more, all offer their views and insights on varied and diverse sets of issues. Topics include potential effects of violent content in videogames, cheating and anti-social behavior, business practices in the games industry, social and cultural diversity and representation in games, moral values in games and gameplay, freedom of expression, and how games are uniquely positioned as an art form to encourage players to reflect on ethics and morality. The Videogame Ethics Reader is a unique collection of writings on videogames and ethics by leading scholars and practitioners. It includes game analyses, case studies, and thought-provoking essays that serve as a valuable companion to traditional ethics textbooks. This book provides an entry point for thinking, deliberating, and discussing ethical topics surrounding videogames and their accompanying technologies. It also serves as a springboard for examining how this relatively new medium can provide us with insights on many of the moral and ethical questions that have been with us for centuries. " " Dr. José P. Zagal is a game designer and scholar. He serves on the faculty at DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media where he teaches a variety of courses on game design and analysis, online communities, and ethics. In his research he explores the analysis, design, and use of videogames for encouraging ethical reasoning and reflection. He is also interested in supporting games literacy through the use of collaborative learning environments. His book on this topic, Defining, Understanding, and Supporting Games Education was published in 2010. Zagal is a member of the executive board of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). He has published many articles on videogames in leading journals in the field of game studies and regularly presents on these and other topics at international conferences."
328 pages, Paperback
First published December 19, 2011
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December 4, 2012
Sometimes, one is too close to an industry or situation to be objective. On many issues, that is the case for me after spending close to two decades covering the electronic game industry (not to be confused with the electronic gaming industry which would refer to slot machines and video poker machines). Two such issues are covered in The Videogame Ethics Reader: ratings in relationship to censorship and the assertion of labor abuses within the industry. I will offer reactions to those and other essays in order to help you determine if this book is for you. Currently, I require it as a textbook in an ethics class about the film and game industry that I teach and it was compiled by a colleague who often points me in interesting directions with regard to study. So, you should know that my relatively high rating reflects my vocational needs, my collegial bias, and personal experience. I had also read several of the articles separately before reading them in the context of adopting this textbook, so please don’t feel like I’m intentionally showing disrespect for certain articles when they didn’t intrigue me as much the second and third time around. I think the best way to describe this book is to give an essay by essay summary sentence and offer follow-up questions or comments. I will provide these in the same order in which they exist in the compilation.
The first essay bears the sub-title, “Can Violent Videogames be a Source for Good?” The essay begins with one of those factual indicators for which there may be no clear evidence of correlation, but clearly shows that murders and non-negligent manslaughter has decreased significantly in the videogame era. While Craig Ferguson’s introductory illustration may not be verifiable in terms of correlation, it certainly offers a counterintuitive data series to the assumption that media violence causes violence. Remember also that it is extremely difficult to prove a “negative.” After ripping the low evidentiary standards for most anti-videogame materials, Ferguson cites “…a number of studies, both experimental and correlational, have found that playing violent video games is associated with high visuospatial acuity, perception, processing, visual memory, and mental rotation.” (p. 19) I was delighted to see the references because my anecdotal experience has been that anything that stimulates problem solving, such as videogames and, prior to that, board strategy games and pen/paper RPGs creates a foundation for further learning and research.
In “Now It’s Personal: On Abusive Game Design,” Douglas Wilson (no relation) and Miguel Sicart deal with game designs that are intended to humiliate or “punish” the player in order to make a point. Although I’ve covered the industry for years, I was unaware of most of these games and feel somewhat disgusted by the nature of these “games” that remove some of the vital elements of play from the interactive experience. Such games seem to be “deconstructing” the player rather than shaking up the tropes and clichés of game conventions. If these “games” were simply presented as “art,” that would be acceptable, but the idea of inflicting these agenda-driven designs on unsuspecting consumers seems most unethical. I was glad Zagal selected this article for inclusion in this collection.
“The Meaning of Race and Violence in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” is an article published in Games and Culture that has garnered lots of attention. In the article, Ben DeVane and Kurt Squire performed detailed interviews with younger, casual gamers, early teen athletes, and serious gamers in their late teens. The casual gamers were predominantly African-American in ethnicity, as were the athlete group, while the serious gamers tended to be of European American ancestry. My problem with this research is that the sample size is small, the groups have different age demographics, and the conclusions may be as much related to age as opposed to the psychographic and sociographic delimiters. The important insight? Serious gamers suggested that a person who was already insecure in themselves might have a problem as a result of playing the game. The athletes believed that if a person was already “messed up” that they might be negatively influenced by the game. The casuals were more concerned with showing off for their friends than correlating the game experience with anything in real life. I have my students read this article, but we discuss the sloppy methodology and slippery results, as well.
Zagal’s own essay on “Encouraging Ethical Reflection with Video Games” is intriguing. He posits the ethical dilemma as the heart of “morality” in videogames, but notes that players often treat such situations as puzzles to be “reverse-engineered” rather than an opportunity for reflection. He surveys Ultima IVs character creation through ethical dilemmas, Heavy Rain’s use of icon-based emotion/motivation commands, the player-determined brutality of Manhunt, and the experience of killing virtual characters that the player had invested time in training in Fire Emblem. The best take-away from this essay is the truth that “Ethical systems that are opaque to their players risk becoming perceived as morally irrelevant: if there is no way to understand, why bother.” (p. 78)
Another essay I regularly use in my classes is “Gaining Advantage: How Videogame Players Define and Negotiate Cheating” by Mia Consalvo. In this article, Consalvo posits a continuum of cheating from those hardcore gamers who believe even the consulting of a walkthrough or strategy guide is cheating to those who think it is only cheating if there is another human player involved. Others don’t believe getting hints or using external resources would be cheating as long as cheat codes are not used and the game programming itself (code) isn’t violated. About the only general consensus in her survey of gamers would be the fact that almost all of those gamers felt that those who deliberately sabotaged or take advantage of loopholes/cheats in multiplayer games were definitely cheaters.
The cautionary tale of “A Rape in Cyberspace” caused me to pay attention like a driver on a Southern California freeway gawking at a particularly hideous automobile wreck. I was fascinated, appalled, disgusted, and angry at the same time. In recounting the story of a LambdaMOO participant who (actually turned out to be an entire dormitory wing) abused an entire community, the author offered a sad recounting of how a “real” virtual community could have been formed in reaction and how much of the opportunity was lost. To me, it raises the question of sensitivity. I remember some strange events in my early days of text-based MUDs and MOOs, but nothing as horrendous and offensive as this account.
“Playing Metal Gear Solid 4 Well” can be summarized in two sentences: “Get some skills and match them to the environment to accomplish goals. That’s gaming (later I’ll tell you that that’s life, too).” (p. 126) Obviously, if James Gee’s assertion (and some of the fascinating supporting evidence he gives) is that games improve our real-life skills as well as our game prowess, this means that considering the representational aspects of games is significant—too significant to be left to chance.
“Grow-A-Game” offers intriguing ideas for “values conscious design.” The article sets out an experimental methodology for both values-focused analysis of games and values-conscious design (p. 135). Although there is a validity in both exercises, it seems to me that the latter is more suited for values-conscious adaptation than design.
Peter Rauch seems to underscore Zagal’s point cited earlier about opaque ethical systems. In “Playing with Good and Evil,” Rauch establishes the ambiguity of the ethical system in Fable (p. 147—as also, IMHO, this is the case in Fallout 3) and essentially proves the point made earlier in our discussion. I even chuckled in remembering the same exasperation encountered by Rauch due to interface design (p. 148--“examine” and “take” use the same command, so one can often “steal” when one only intends to “look”). I enjoyed Rauch’s brief description of Kantian deontology with regard to lying (p. 151—a consideration with which we spend a fair amount of time in our ethics course for games and cinema at DePaul University) and Utilitarian functionalism as described by Mill and Bentham (pp. 155-157--another important consideration in our course).
Miguel Sicart returns in the next essay, “Applying Ethics: Case Studies.” His first case study is the classic Bioshock. For me, the irony of Bioshock is that it uses the rhetoric of choice while often mitigating the results of the choices given to players and, at certain critical junctures, taking choice away from the gamer. It was a great conversational point, but I’m not sure it worked as a game with authentic ethical choices. I agree with Sicart that the illusion of choice in the game trivializes the player’s decision-making. The arguments made by Sicart for the value of playing Defcon are similar to the arguments that I make for playing Diplomacy variants in my ethics classes. Giving players the opportunity to make and break alliances, along with having restrictions against multi-player wins adds constraints to the ethical dilemmas to be encountered.
One of my biggest disagreements with one of the contributors to this volume related to “’EA Spouse’ and the Crisis of Video Game Labour.” Check out the spelling of labor/labour. This article does not originate in Silicon Valley and was not written by someone steeped in U.S. culture in general, much less the role of entrepreneurism. Yes, there are some flaws in the industry, but the knee-jerk assumption that organizing labor (excuse me, “labour”) is going to solve them is absurd. This is the solution of someone from a predominantly socialist economy who doesn’t understand aspiration and accomplishment as part of the U.S. experience in general and technological entertainment in particular. Yet, the fact is that we would not have nearly as many new developers springing up were it not for the lenient legal environment that allows the “wage slavery” described by this author to exist. As someone who worked crazy hours to build a magazine that succeeded, as well as a couple of projects which failed, I know that the entrepreneurial model falls apart when HR considerations overwhelm those of creativity, ambition, vision and aspiration.
“Putting the Gay in Games” laments the dearth of homosexual characters in games (although it recognizes that there are a few stereotypical ones) and GLBT employees in the videogame workplace. The most glaring disconnect with the author’s presentation of the % of GLBT employees in the videogame industry was the lament that there were only 1.5% of transgendered individuals in the industry (p. 216). Gee, that compares with .3% of the U.S. population. I suppose that jumped out at me because the first three people I knew that existed in this population were active in the game industry. A 2011 study by the Williams Institute of Law at UCLA gave 4% of the general population as identifying themselves as gay, lesbian or bi-sexual. Yet, this article laments the mere 5.1% which identified themselves in one of those ways in the game industry. I know I’ll probably be labeled as “homophobic” or as a “hater” for calling out this author on her own statistics, but it’s hard to feel like a population is being oppressed in a given industry when the percentage is higher than that of the general population.
Casey O’Donnell’s instructive summary of how digital and copyright legal cases with regard to the NES and Sega Genesis systems can instruct us regarding the current Digital Rights Management law (signed by Bill Clinton) and the decline in innovation due to DRM strictures. I use this essay a lot, but I’m not sure how to summarize it without going into too much detail.
Filled with legal citations and valuable definitions, James Newman negotiates the shoals of “Codemining, Modding, and Gamemaking” in order to cast light on the gray areas of emulation, hacking, customizing, and the like. There’s a lot of quicksand in this area and this is the most helpful discussion of it available.
Finally, the volume concludes with an interview of Doug Lowenstein, executive director of ESA (formerly IDSA), about censorship and ratings. Lowenstein says a lot of the right things about games as protected speech. However, he appeals to the idea of the average 29 year old gamer in one place (p. 278) and states that only 17% of those buying games without their parents are minors at another (p. 284). He seems to lament the fact that the issue is handled with a demagoguery that presents a false issue of it being a children’s issue.
Well, guess what? It could have been a lot more convincing if he had stood up against the idea of age-graded ratings back when “Colt Sporter” Joe Liebermann first started trying to legislate “pixels” while he lobbied for “pistols” as the Senator from the Colt’s Manufacturing Co, LLC. At that time, those of us on the Recreational Software Advisory Council warned that the age-ratings belied the fact that videogames in general and PC games in particular were not primarily children’s products. But Liebermann’s Legislative Assistant wanted age ratings and the Senator from Colt used his leverage to bend the console manufacturers in that direction. Lowenstein was complicit in that decision and has to bear some of the brunt of that decision. Plus, his interview shows that he is deliberately unaware of how ratings (particularly those that have age labels on them) are used to censor content. That is none of his business (p. 288). If it isn’t at least partially the business of the person in charge of the ratings system, whose business is it?
As you can tell, there is plenty of material in this volume to debate over for years and years. I’ve merely offered my tip of the iceberg perception.
The first essay bears the sub-title, “Can Violent Videogames be a Source for Good?” The essay begins with one of those factual indicators for which there may be no clear evidence of correlation, but clearly shows that murders and non-negligent manslaughter has decreased significantly in the videogame era. While Craig Ferguson’s introductory illustration may not be verifiable in terms of correlation, it certainly offers a counterintuitive data series to the assumption that media violence causes violence. Remember also that it is extremely difficult to prove a “negative.” After ripping the low evidentiary standards for most anti-videogame materials, Ferguson cites “…a number of studies, both experimental and correlational, have found that playing violent video games is associated with high visuospatial acuity, perception, processing, visual memory, and mental rotation.” (p. 19) I was delighted to see the references because my anecdotal experience has been that anything that stimulates problem solving, such as videogames and, prior to that, board strategy games and pen/paper RPGs creates a foundation for further learning and research.
In “Now It’s Personal: On Abusive Game Design,” Douglas Wilson (no relation) and Miguel Sicart deal with game designs that are intended to humiliate or “punish” the player in order to make a point. Although I’ve covered the industry for years, I was unaware of most of these games and feel somewhat disgusted by the nature of these “games” that remove some of the vital elements of play from the interactive experience. Such games seem to be “deconstructing” the player rather than shaking up the tropes and clichés of game conventions. If these “games” were simply presented as “art,” that would be acceptable, but the idea of inflicting these agenda-driven designs on unsuspecting consumers seems most unethical. I was glad Zagal selected this article for inclusion in this collection.
“The Meaning of Race and Violence in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” is an article published in Games and Culture that has garnered lots of attention. In the article, Ben DeVane and Kurt Squire performed detailed interviews with younger, casual gamers, early teen athletes, and serious gamers in their late teens. The casual gamers were predominantly African-American in ethnicity, as were the athlete group, while the serious gamers tended to be of European American ancestry. My problem with this research is that the sample size is small, the groups have different age demographics, and the conclusions may be as much related to age as opposed to the psychographic and sociographic delimiters. The important insight? Serious gamers suggested that a person who was already insecure in themselves might have a problem as a result of playing the game. The athletes believed that if a person was already “messed up” that they might be negatively influenced by the game. The casuals were more concerned with showing off for their friends than correlating the game experience with anything in real life. I have my students read this article, but we discuss the sloppy methodology and slippery results, as well.
Zagal’s own essay on “Encouraging Ethical Reflection with Video Games” is intriguing. He posits the ethical dilemma as the heart of “morality” in videogames, but notes that players often treat such situations as puzzles to be “reverse-engineered” rather than an opportunity for reflection. He surveys Ultima IVs character creation through ethical dilemmas, Heavy Rain’s use of icon-based emotion/motivation commands, the player-determined brutality of Manhunt, and the experience of killing virtual characters that the player had invested time in training in Fire Emblem. The best take-away from this essay is the truth that “Ethical systems that are opaque to their players risk becoming perceived as morally irrelevant: if there is no way to understand, why bother.” (p. 78)
Another essay I regularly use in my classes is “Gaining Advantage: How Videogame Players Define and Negotiate Cheating” by Mia Consalvo. In this article, Consalvo posits a continuum of cheating from those hardcore gamers who believe even the consulting of a walkthrough or strategy guide is cheating to those who think it is only cheating if there is another human player involved. Others don’t believe getting hints or using external resources would be cheating as long as cheat codes are not used and the game programming itself (code) isn’t violated. About the only general consensus in her survey of gamers would be the fact that almost all of those gamers felt that those who deliberately sabotaged or take advantage of loopholes/cheats in multiplayer games were definitely cheaters.
The cautionary tale of “A Rape in Cyberspace” caused me to pay attention like a driver on a Southern California freeway gawking at a particularly hideous automobile wreck. I was fascinated, appalled, disgusted, and angry at the same time. In recounting the story of a LambdaMOO participant who (actually turned out to be an entire dormitory wing) abused an entire community, the author offered a sad recounting of how a “real” virtual community could have been formed in reaction and how much of the opportunity was lost. To me, it raises the question of sensitivity. I remember some strange events in my early days of text-based MUDs and MOOs, but nothing as horrendous and offensive as this account.
“Playing Metal Gear Solid 4 Well” can be summarized in two sentences: “Get some skills and match them to the environment to accomplish goals. That’s gaming (later I’ll tell you that that’s life, too).” (p. 126) Obviously, if James Gee’s assertion (and some of the fascinating supporting evidence he gives) is that games improve our real-life skills as well as our game prowess, this means that considering the representational aspects of games is significant—too significant to be left to chance.
“Grow-A-Game” offers intriguing ideas for “values conscious design.” The article sets out an experimental methodology for both values-focused analysis of games and values-conscious design (p. 135). Although there is a validity in both exercises, it seems to me that the latter is more suited for values-conscious adaptation than design.
Peter Rauch seems to underscore Zagal’s point cited earlier about opaque ethical systems. In “Playing with Good and Evil,” Rauch establishes the ambiguity of the ethical system in Fable (p. 147—as also, IMHO, this is the case in Fallout 3) and essentially proves the point made earlier in our discussion. I even chuckled in remembering the same exasperation encountered by Rauch due to interface design (p. 148--“examine” and “take” use the same command, so one can often “steal” when one only intends to “look”). I enjoyed Rauch’s brief description of Kantian deontology with regard to lying (p. 151—a consideration with which we spend a fair amount of time in our ethics course for games and cinema at DePaul University) and Utilitarian functionalism as described by Mill and Bentham (pp. 155-157--another important consideration in our course).
Miguel Sicart returns in the next essay, “Applying Ethics: Case Studies.” His first case study is the classic Bioshock. For me, the irony of Bioshock is that it uses the rhetoric of choice while often mitigating the results of the choices given to players and, at certain critical junctures, taking choice away from the gamer. It was a great conversational point, but I’m not sure it worked as a game with authentic ethical choices. I agree with Sicart that the illusion of choice in the game trivializes the player’s decision-making. The arguments made by Sicart for the value of playing Defcon are similar to the arguments that I make for playing Diplomacy variants in my ethics classes. Giving players the opportunity to make and break alliances, along with having restrictions against multi-player wins adds constraints to the ethical dilemmas to be encountered.
One of my biggest disagreements with one of the contributors to this volume related to “’EA Spouse’ and the Crisis of Video Game Labour.” Check out the spelling of labor/labour. This article does not originate in Silicon Valley and was not written by someone steeped in U.S. culture in general, much less the role of entrepreneurism. Yes, there are some flaws in the industry, but the knee-jerk assumption that organizing labor (excuse me, “labour”) is going to solve them is absurd. This is the solution of someone from a predominantly socialist economy who doesn’t understand aspiration and accomplishment as part of the U.S. experience in general and technological entertainment in particular. Yet, the fact is that we would not have nearly as many new developers springing up were it not for the lenient legal environment that allows the “wage slavery” described by this author to exist. As someone who worked crazy hours to build a magazine that succeeded, as well as a couple of projects which failed, I know that the entrepreneurial model falls apart when HR considerations overwhelm those of creativity, ambition, vision and aspiration.
“Putting the Gay in Games” laments the dearth of homosexual characters in games (although it recognizes that there are a few stereotypical ones) and GLBT employees in the videogame workplace. The most glaring disconnect with the author’s presentation of the % of GLBT employees in the videogame industry was the lament that there were only 1.5% of transgendered individuals in the industry (p. 216). Gee, that compares with .3% of the U.S. population. I suppose that jumped out at me because the first three people I knew that existed in this population were active in the game industry. A 2011 study by the Williams Institute of Law at UCLA gave 4% of the general population as identifying themselves as gay, lesbian or bi-sexual. Yet, this article laments the mere 5.1% which identified themselves in one of those ways in the game industry. I know I’ll probably be labeled as “homophobic” or as a “hater” for calling out this author on her own statistics, but it’s hard to feel like a population is being oppressed in a given industry when the percentage is higher than that of the general population.
Casey O’Donnell’s instructive summary of how digital and copyright legal cases with regard to the NES and Sega Genesis systems can instruct us regarding the current Digital Rights Management law (signed by Bill Clinton) and the decline in innovation due to DRM strictures. I use this essay a lot, but I’m not sure how to summarize it without going into too much detail.
Filled with legal citations and valuable definitions, James Newman negotiates the shoals of “Codemining, Modding, and Gamemaking” in order to cast light on the gray areas of emulation, hacking, customizing, and the like. There’s a lot of quicksand in this area and this is the most helpful discussion of it available.
Finally, the volume concludes with an interview of Doug Lowenstein, executive director of ESA (formerly IDSA), about censorship and ratings. Lowenstein says a lot of the right things about games as protected speech. However, he appeals to the idea of the average 29 year old gamer in one place (p. 278) and states that only 17% of those buying games without their parents are minors at another (p. 284). He seems to lament the fact that the issue is handled with a demagoguery that presents a false issue of it being a children’s issue.
Well, guess what? It could have been a lot more convincing if he had stood up against the idea of age-graded ratings back when “Colt Sporter” Joe Liebermann first started trying to legislate “pixels” while he lobbied for “pistols” as the Senator from the Colt’s Manufacturing Co, LLC. At that time, those of us on the Recreational Software Advisory Council warned that the age-ratings belied the fact that videogames in general and PC games in particular were not primarily children’s products. But Liebermann’s Legislative Assistant wanted age ratings and the Senator from Colt used his leverage to bend the console manufacturers in that direction. Lowenstein was complicit in that decision and has to bear some of the brunt of that decision. Plus, his interview shows that he is deliberately unaware of how ratings (particularly those that have age labels on them) are used to censor content. That is none of his business (p. 288). If it isn’t at least partially the business of the person in charge of the ratings system, whose business is it?
As you can tell, there is plenty of material in this volume to debate over for years and years. I’ve merely offered my tip of the iceberg perception.
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