Beyond Choices ─ The Design of Ethical Gameplay

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'smoral imagination. In Beyond Choices, Miguel Sicart calls for a new generation ofvideo and computer games that are ethically relevant by design. In the 1970s, mainstream films --including The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, and TaxiDriver -- filled theaters but also treated their audiences as thinking beings. Why can'tmainstream video games have the same moral and aesthetic impact? Sicart argues that it is time forgames to claim their place in the cultural landscape as vehicles for ethicalreflection.

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 gamedevelopers, Sicart provides a systematic account of how games can be designed to challenge andenrich our moral lives. After discussing such topics as definition of ethical gameplay and thestructure of the game as a designed object, Sicart offers a theory of the design of ethical gameplay. He also analyzes the ethical aspects of game play in a number of current games, includingSpec Ops: The Line, Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer, Fallout New Vegas, and AnnaAnthropy's Dys4Ia. Games are designed to evoke specific emotions; games thatengage players ethically, Sicart argues, enable us to explore and express our values throughplay.

Miguel Sicart is Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen. He is the author of The Ethics of Computer Games (MIT Press).