Ethics and Game Design: Are They Like Oil And Water? Part I

In Part I of this article, Saferize founder Gustavo Guida reflects on the recent GDC 2018 game design ethics roundtable and concludes that game designers are locked in a Prisoner's Dilemma with potentially devastating consequences.

 

Can the gaming industry grow and prosper without compromising ethics? 

I had the opportunity to attend a very interesting roundtable at GDC 2018 presented by IGDA. The event was called "Professional Ethics for Game Designers" and was hosted by Sande Chen, Writers Guild Award and Grammy-nominated Writer and Game Designer (you should check out her interesting review of the event, by the way). The roundtable beckoned designers to voice an opinion “as to whether or not game designers need a professional code of ethics much like the Hippocratic oath for doctors.”

Here is the event description:

With gaming disorder a mental health concern, do game designers have an obligation to refrain what would be considered ‘exploitative design,’ that is, game design that takes advantage of player addictions and/or mental defects?

I expected to leave that event with some sort of consensus. What I really wanted was to see a core of game designers starting a movement that could culminate with a positive change in the industry. After all, we’ve seen similar movements on adjacent industries such as Social Media, where industry luminaries and even former Facebook executives complained about the addictive nature of social media (even implicating themselves). We’ve also seen organizations such as the Center for Humane Technology which was created to demonstrate how this technology could be used for good.

However, it seems that the gaming industry hasn’t reached that stage of enlightenment yet. Sadly, the roundtable ended with no consensus. What we saw instead was gamers split into three groups, which I have categorized:

1. The Concerned: Game designers very concerned with the well-being of players, and with addiction and its consequences.
2. The Skeptics: Those that were refusing to see the danger that games could cause. They attempted to blur the lines between an engaging experience with an addictive one.
3. The Pragmatists: Those who took a more profit-driven focus. This group believes that exploiting addictions and vulnerabilities is the nature of the industry, and that those who refuse to do so will be less competitive.

Prisoner’s Dilemma

What I realized after leaving the event is that the industry is facing what is called a Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is a psychological experiment that tests self-interest. Basically, if two criminals betray each other, they each receive two years in prison. If one betrays the other, the betrayer walks free while the betrayed gets the maximum sentence of three years. If they cooperate, they each receive only one year on lesser charges. The criminals must make this decision without any knowledge of what the other will do.

Game designers seem to be faced with a similar dilemma, and few are willing to cooperate. They want to betray each other (and their consumers by proxy) by making their games more addictive than their competitors’ games. The harsh consequence they would receive by the betrayal of their competitor would be loss of revenue or even their company’s economic viabilities. Alternatively, game designers could cooperate and do what’s in the best interest of everyone involved.

Choosing to betray one another and continuing to design games to be more and more addictive can lead to very frightening consequences (such as the kid who had a seizure in China after playing the mobile game, Honour of Kings, for 40 straight hours). If something like that becomes the norm, it is likely that there will eventually be social pressure for the government to step in. The outcome could be harsh limits imposed by laws, which could mean compliance costs that will only benefit large corporations that can absorb those costs.

Professor Ian Schreiber, from Rochester, NY, talks about these potential government limitations, mentioning that gridlocked US politicians looking to score easy political points with their constituents could do so by regulating loot boxes (we will talk more about them later). “It is an easy bipartisan political win that’s almost sure to happen in the near future,” says Schreiber. He pointed out that the gaming industry must work on self-regulation, and take a proactive role to stop psychological exploitation of users before it’s too late. Using the Honour of Kings case again, the Chinese government stepped in by setting a strict 1-hour-a-day limit on gaming for kids 12 years old and younger.

But Pragmatists and Skeptics don’t see it this way, so they don’t see the need to self-regulate. They tend to view it as a simple supply and demand scenario, firmly believing that if they don’t offer this addictive service, someone else will.

It’s really no different than when criminals justify their actions by claiming that they hold no personal responsibility for providing a service that people demand. You hear this over and over in movies, usually when a criminal is caught by the good guy and justifies his actions by claiming he is just one among many, a cog in the machine. “If I don’t sell, some other drug dealer will. People are looking for this anyway.”
 
In real life, many famous gangsters used similar lines. Otto Berman, an accountant for the mafia in the 1930s coined the phrase “Nothing personal, it’s just business.” By ignoring the well-being of players, aren’t game designers ultimately subscribing to this idea as well?

Or maybe, Pragmatist game designers prefer a quote from another mobster from the 1930’s called Lucky Luciano (he ordered Berman’s death, by the way). His phrase was “There’s no such thing as good money or bad money. There’s just money.”

Personally, I think it’s really hard for game designers to argue that they’re not only in it for profit, especially when you consider another topic we discussed at the roundtable: video games and gambling. It turns out that there are a lot of disturbing similarities between the two.

[This article originally appeared on Saferize's Medium blog.]

Gustavo Guida has been involved with product and marketing since 2000. Third-time entrepreneur, he found and sold two successful businesses before co-founding Saferize. Father of triplet girls.

Statistics vs. Stories

In this article, game designer Sande Chen looks at why social impact game designers should consider emotion-based appeals rather than statistics-filled logic.

You've likely seen the appeals before.  They usually come at the end of year.  Help us cure cancer, give to your alumni fund, donate to needy students, etc.  What motivates us to care, and care enough to do something?

As Chip Heath & Dan Heath state in their book, Made to Stick, charities have long grasped that the emotional appeal of a story does a better job of opening checkbooks than the logical stance of statistics.  That's why you "adopt" a wild horse or help a young girl in Africa named Rukia. The charity allows you to imagine how the money from giving up your morning Starbucks for 2 months would drastically change Rukia's life.  Her family would have access to running water!  Perhaps you'll even receive progress reports on Rukia telling you how much your contribution has meant to her life.  So why do some social impact game designers still rely on cold and impersonal statistical pop-ups scattered about in the game?

In fact, the Heaths relate a research study in which researchers had one group calculate a math problem and another group think about babies before being asked to donate to a cause.  Even without telling the story about Rukia, the "babies" group was primed to give more money.

So why is this so?

If I were to tell you, "In February 2018, there were 63,343 homeless people in New York City," you may or may not believe me.  Statistics can be fudged.  But also, 63,343 is a rather large amount.  Would my $3.50 a day really help?  How could it help?

In addition, people often have a hard time contextualizing numbers.  If I am told that one small bag of movie popcorn has 60 grams of saturated fat, what does that mean to me?  Is that good or bad?  Is movie popcorn alright?  If I'm shown all the artery-clogging foods I can think of and told that one small bag of movie popcorn is equivalent to 2 days of eating artery cloggers, then, yeah, I might think again.

As I wrote in "Great Narrative Stories Are the Answer,"  the way to changing attitudes and actions may lie in emotion and the great narrative stories that support that emotion.  Let's find a way to tap into that emotion.


Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

GDC2018: Professional Ethics for Game Designers

The previous year has brought its share of gaming controversies, from anger over loot boxes to ties to gun violence to the World Health Organization's recognition of gaming disorder as a mental health condition. The roundtable, "Professional Ethics for Game Designers (Presented by the IGDA Game Design SIG)," at this year's Game Developers Conference, sought to shed light on the thoughts and opinions of professional game designers on their ethical obligations to players.  The discussion was spirited and showed that there was no easy consensus.

The roundtable started off with a warning from a professor who studies these matters.  He cautioned the group that if the industry doesn't self-regulate, governments will inevitably step in with their own regulations that might not make sense.  He cited some examples from Asia, such as a law limiting gameplay hours to school-age children, and said that there were even systems in place whereby in-game rewards were reduced based on the number of hours played.   There have even been rumblings in Europe about possible regulations.

While regulations may be looming, others felt like designers should not have any ethical obligations to players, even if players dropped dead after playing too much.  With a comparison to the tobacco industry, one decried the nanny state and felt like players needed to be responsible for their own well-being.  Another felt that game-playing was viewed too negatively and surely, no one would object if someone practiced continuously as an athlete.  He relayed the story of a co-worker who had taken a week's vacation to get higher on the leaderboard and how people immediately thought his co-worker might have a gaming disorder.

Still others felt that without addictive design elements, players would not come back to the game.  After all, there's pressure on designers to design an addictive, fun game that makes players come back and play the game.  Even if designers objected to exploitative practices, their bosses or marketing would want them to keep on using those methods.  And of course, a designer who wants to still have a job there will want the company to be successful.  But there were designers at the roundtable who had quit because they just couldn't stand what was happening to the players.  They recommended that designers think carefully about what line they would cross before being asked to cross that line.

After hearing jokes about some possible warning labels, like "WARNING:  TOO MUCH FUN," the professor interjected, saying that tobacco wasn't the right comparison, but gambling was.  He pointed out that the game industry even takes the same terminology, such as "whales," from the gambling industry.  While the WHO's definition of gaming disorder can be subject to interpretation, it's most similar to gambling disorder.  It doesn't specify a number of hours, just describes the way that compulsive gaming can cause distress or significant life problems.  We commonly say a game is addictive to mean it's fun, but addiction has a clinical definition that is much more bothersome.

Another game designer said that he doesn't mind if his games have a specific target audience, like women over 50, but he would have a problem if the target was "senile women," or any vulnerable demographic.  He would rather players come back to play the game because of its fun qualities rather than because they're addicted and they have a compulsion.

Another designer wondered if these addictive game systems were even necessary and offered other design alternatives to making a game sticky.

All in all, it was an interesting roundtable that could have gone on to discuss various other ethical issues.  Do you have any opinions on the subject?  I have heard from game design professors who include ethics in their lessons.  Do you believe that game designers should have an ethical code?