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Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay
How computer games can be designed to create ethically relevant experiences for players.
Today's blockbuster video games—and their never-ending sequels, sagas, and reboots--provide plenty of excitement in high-resolution but for the most part fail to engage a player's moral imagination. In Beyond Choices, Miguel Sicart calls for a new generation of video and computer games that are ethically relevant by design. In the 1970s, mainstream films—including The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver—filled theaters but also treated their audiences as thinking beings. Why can't mainstream video games have the same moral and aesthetic impact? Sicart argues that it is time for games to claim their place in the cultural landscape as vehicles for ethical reflection.
Sicart looks at games in many manifestations: toys, analog games, computer and video games, interactive fictions, commercial entertainments, and independent releases. Drawing on philosophy, design theory, literary studies, aesthetics, and interviews with game developers, Sicart provides a systematic account of how games can be designed to challenge and enrich our moral lives. After discussing such topics as definition of ethical gameplay and the structure of the game as a designed object, Sicart offers a theory of the design of ethical game play. He also analyzes the ethical aspects of game play in a number of current games, including Spec Ops: The Line, Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer, Fallout New Vegas, and Anna Anthropy's Dys4Ia. Games are designed to evoke specific emotions; games that engage players ethically, Sicart argues, enable us to explore and express our values through play.
Today's blockbuster video games—and their never-ending sequels, sagas, and reboots--provide plenty of excitement in high-resolution but for the most part fail to engage a player's moral imagination. In Beyond Choices, Miguel Sicart calls for a new generation of video and computer games that are ethically relevant by design. In the 1970s, mainstream films—including The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver—filled theaters but also treated their audiences as thinking beings. Why can't mainstream video games have the same moral and aesthetic impact? Sicart argues that it is time for games to claim their place in the cultural landscape as vehicles for ethical reflection.
Sicart looks at games in many manifestations: toys, analog games, computer and video games, interactive fictions, commercial entertainments, and independent releases. Drawing on philosophy, design theory, literary studies, aesthetics, and interviews with game developers, Sicart provides a systematic account of how games can be designed to challenge and enrich our moral lives. After discussing such topics as definition of ethical gameplay and the structure of the game as a designed object, Sicart offers a theory of the design of ethical game play. He also analyzes the ethical aspects of game play in a number of current games, including Spec Ops: The Line, Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer, Fallout New Vegas, and Anna Anthropy's Dys4Ia. Games are designed to evoke specific emotions; games that engage players ethically, Sicart argues, enable us to explore and express our values through play.
180 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
10 people are currently reading
102 people want to read
About the author
Miguel Sicart
8 books11 followersMiguel Sicart is Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Game Research at IT University Copenhagen. He is the author of The Ethics of Computer Games and Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay, both published by the MIT Press.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 17, 2016
1) "The most fascinating of these characteristics is the informality of moral systems. Gert uses the analogy of pickup basketball games. All players are aware of the rules and act on them even though there is no formal refereeing. A legal system or a professional game of basketball requires judges to carry out a formal policing of the rules. But in a pickup game, as with morality, players enforce the rules. In moral systems, people, individually and collectively, support the ethical rules without the need for formal refereeing.
This notion of informality is crucial to my understanding of the design of ethical gameplay. Some game rules that govern moral behavior are based on values, but these rules are informal. Humans follow them even though no authoritative judges preside over them. This leads to a wiggle space where there is the possibility of contextual negotiation and interpretation of these rules."
2) "Ethics is both the formal study of the moral system and the development of the principles of evaluation that govern our rules of conduct. To understand ethical gameplay, I propose that ethics be considered in two different ways---how the design of a game can create experiences in which the use of moral rules is meaningful and how players potentially interact with these designs."
3) "Ethical gameplay is an experience in and of play that disrupts the progression towards goals and achievements and forces players to address their actions from a moral perspective. Ethical gameplay is play that looks at itself to evaluate and reflect about its purpose, meaning, and impact. [...] Ethical gameplay is important because it shows how games can voluntarily, complicitly open themselves toward more than instrumental manipulation."
4) "A game is a device for creating experiences."
5) "Games have meaning to us because of the spaces that players make out of audiovisual materials, social relations, fragile alliances, and hidden loves. Games engage players by constructing a world into which they pour their being. The meaning of games is found in the way that players live by the rules, playfully and emotionally, within a space of play. This space consists of metaphors, players, the context in which the game is played, and the context created by the game. The space of play is a space of interpretation---of the game system and of the activity, by players, when playing. The being of games happens in this space."
6) "Ethical dilemmas are interesting tools for creating ethical gameplay if the dilemma is presented as a wicked problem. Players will have to use their moral thinking, and solving the dilemma will be a moral act. This act will not need to be evaluated by the system, as players will be aware that any solution to a wicked problem involves evaluation based on their own values. In other words, players need to think about the meaning of their actions. The game reacts to the decisions taken but will not quantify the player's ethics."
This notion of informality is crucial to my understanding of the design of ethical gameplay. Some game rules that govern moral behavior are based on values, but these rules are informal. Humans follow them even though no authoritative judges preside over them. This leads to a wiggle space where there is the possibility of contextual negotiation and interpretation of these rules."
2) "Ethics is both the formal study of the moral system and the development of the principles of evaluation that govern our rules of conduct. To understand ethical gameplay, I propose that ethics be considered in two different ways---how the design of a game can create experiences in which the use of moral rules is meaningful and how players potentially interact with these designs."
3) "Ethical gameplay is an experience in and of play that disrupts the progression towards goals and achievements and forces players to address their actions from a moral perspective. Ethical gameplay is play that looks at itself to evaluate and reflect about its purpose, meaning, and impact. [...] Ethical gameplay is important because it shows how games can voluntarily, complicitly open themselves toward more than instrumental manipulation."
4) "A game is a device for creating experiences."
5) "Games have meaning to us because of the spaces that players make out of audiovisual materials, social relations, fragile alliances, and hidden loves. Games engage players by constructing a world into which they pour their being. The meaning of games is found in the way that players live by the rules, playfully and emotionally, within a space of play. This space consists of metaphors, players, the context in which the game is played, and the context created by the game. The space of play is a space of interpretation---of the game system and of the activity, by players, when playing. The being of games happens in this space."
6) "Ethical dilemmas are interesting tools for creating ethical gameplay if the dilemma is presented as a wicked problem. Players will have to use their moral thinking, and solving the dilemma will be a moral act. This act will not need to be evaluated by the system, as players will be aware that any solution to a wicked problem involves evaluation based on their own values. In other words, players need to think about the meaning of their actions. The game reacts to the decisions taken but will not quantify the player's ethics."
March 26, 2015
Overall, I disliked the book, but it was interesting to see the wicked problem concept applied to games. You and I probably have a more ethical way to spend our money.
+++ The notion of a wicked problem, explained in the context of games. Not innovative, as shown by prior work included in the reference list of this book, but useful.
--- The thin, speculative theories. In the end, the author admits the proposed framework can fail, if used too obviously and without embedding into a broader game context. Simply put, the ethical framework proposed here can seem to players moralist and preachy.
-- The survey of relate work is unstructured.
-- The use of examples is rather poor. The games selected to exemplify aspects of the theory or simply to analyze are often obscure, and their analysis has a confirmation bias (the author picks from the selected games only the parts that confirm his theory, leaving the others aside).
--- The pompous writing. The attempt to cast this as a book accessibble to everyone is deceiving. The long apology to semiotics is a major detractor.
+++ The notion of a wicked problem, explained in the context of games. Not innovative, as shown by prior work included in the reference list of this book, but useful.
--- The thin, speculative theories. In the end, the author admits the proposed framework can fail, if used too obviously and without embedding into a broader game context. Simply put, the ethical framework proposed here can seem to players moralist and preachy.
-- The survey of relate work is unstructured.
-- The use of examples is rather poor. The games selected to exemplify aspects of the theory or simply to analyze are often obscure, and their analysis has a confirmation bias (the author picks from the selected games only the parts that confirm his theory, leaving the others aside).
--- The pompous writing. The attempt to cast this as a book accessibble to everyone is deceiving. The long apology to semiotics is a major detractor.
July 26, 2014
Sicard reveals many fundamental paradoxes of (computer) games that are a stumble block for designers trying to make an artistic experience. The most important one is: Why would we act ethically in the safety zone of a game? Although I don't think his answer, playing with less safety, is completely satisfying, the book pinpoints this crux and shows about a dozen games that dance around it in different, enlightening, ways. To me, this is an important step towards making games a more important medium.
February 19, 2017
I'd recommend it to anyone, though it is more an academic work geared toward people doing game studies or game design. If you're not in either of those two groups, you'll have to get around the style and language to get any enjoyment and knowledge out of it.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews